128 The American Naturalist. [February,, 
calculable hereditary evils, I find myself by no means, Balaam- 
like, “ blessing them altogether” but arriving at the conclusion 
that with ordinary care and discretion the tendency to mental 
instability is not more mischievous, than the taint of strumous 
disease, of syphilis, of cancer,—in short of any of the other Pro- 
tean ills with which civilized society is permeated. Fortunate 
indeed is the family which comes of a good, hearty, gouty 
stock ; amidst a choice of evils this tendency to gout seems one 
of the least! 
It also appears to me that the attempt to “stamp out” in- 
sanity, though it may seem easy on paper, would prove impos- 
sible in practice. There is an unfortunate correlation between 
various forms of disease which would oblige society to stamp 
out the greater part of the civilized portion of the human race, 
if a serious effort were made to stamp out insanity, one member 
of a strumous family may develop disease of the lung; another 
succumb to cerebral meningitis; a third become insane. The 
child of a drunken father may become insane or be a habitual 
drunkard, but he may also, if the drunken father be Philip of 
Macedon, prove an Alexander the Great. The child of syphili- 
tic parents may develop a train of illsof which insanity may 
be one; or the hereditary taint may leave one generation un- 
touched and destroy the next, as in the case of the House of 
Valois. You can drown the weakest puppy or kitten in a litter, 
but if you destroy your physically weak human beings, you 
may put an end to a Newton, a Voltaire or a Walter Scott. 
What human being, unendowed with supernaturel discern- 
ment, could tell where the stamping out was necessary ? 
One line of action only appears safe and practicable, and. 
it is one which find an increasing number of advocates; 
namely the Sterilization of the Unfit. I do not use this expres- 
sion in the sense of surgical interference, though this course is 
also often advocated ; inevitably injustices would be done, mis- 
takes would occur, ending perhaps in death; public opinion 
would be aroused, and no one would be allowed to interfere 
with the marriages of criminals and imbeciles for some gener- 
ations to come. But what must necessarily be done if society 
is not to be swamped with the criminals, the idiots, the imbe- 
