588 
HEREDITARY INFLUENCE. 
antimony, copper, mercury, silver, gold, and platinum, in the 
state of insoluble sulphuret ; while in itself, it has no in- 
jurious action. When it is associated with calcined mag- 
nesia, it becomes a counter-poison to the acids, and the com- 
pounds of cyanogen, and thus it may be accepted as a general 
antidote to the poisons. 
Extracts from British and Foreign Journals. 
HEREDITARY INFLUENCE, ANIMAL AND HUMAN. 
( Continued from p. 541.) 
Still more striking are the facts of accidents becoming here- 
ditary. A superb stallion, son of Le Glorieux , who came from 
the Pompadour stables, became blind from disease ; all his 
children became blind before they were three years old. 
Burdach cites the case of a woman who nearly died from 
hemorrhage after bloodletting ; her daughter was so sen- 
sitive that a violent hemorrhage would follow even a trifling 
scratch; she, in turn, transmitted this peculiarity to her son. 
Horses marked during successive generations with red-hot 
iron in the same place, transmit the visible traces of such 
marks to their colts. A dog had her hinder parts paralysed 
for several days by a blow ; six of her seven pups were 
deformed or excessively weak in their hinder parts, and were 
drowned as useless.* Treviranusf cites Blumenbach’s case 
of a man whose little finger was crushed and twisted, by an 
accident to his right hand : his sons inherited right hands 
with the little finger distorted. These cases are the more 
surprising, because our daily experience also tells us that ac- 
cidental defects are not transmitted ; for many years it has 
been the custom to cut the ears and tails of terriers, and yet 
terrier pups do not inherit the pointed ears and short tails of 
their parents; for centuries men have lost arms and legs, 
without affecting the limbs of our species. Although, there- 
fore, the deformities and defects of the parent may be in- 
herited, in general they are not. For our present argument 
it is enough that they are so sometimes. 
Idiosyncrasies assuredly belong to the individual, not to 
the species ; otherwise they would not be idiosyncrasies. 
Parents with an unconquerable aversion to animal food, have 
transmitted that aversion ; and parents, with the horrible 
* ‘ Girou,’ p. 127. t * Biologie/ iii, 452. 
