HEREDITARY INFLUENCE. 
719 
writers make it, their moral conclusions would be indis- 
putable. But artists are not bound to be physiologists, and 
are assuredly bad law-givers in such cases. As artists, they 
employ their permitted licence in simplifying the problem 
of insanity to suit their stories ; but when they transcend 
the limits of art, and moralise on their selected cases, 
placing them before the world as typical, they commit a 
serious error, and they teach questionable doctrine, because 
they teach it by means of fallacious facts. Let us be under- 
stood. If it were absolutely certain that a man whose family 
had the “ hereditary taint*’ could not escape the terrible 
inheritance, the moral rule would be clear, the verdict 
against his marrying would be absolute. But happily this 
is by no means the case. The Law of Variation here inter- 
venes. Vulgar observation confirms science in declaring this 
inheritance of insanity to be very uncertain . “ La transmis- 
sion hereditaire,” says Burdach, in summing up, u ne s’etend, 
la plupart du temps, qu’a quelques enfans .” In many cases 
the malady is not transmitted at all. That is to say, it is 
so neutralised by the influence of the other parent as not 
to manifest itself. Out of three children two may inherit 
the malady — or only one — or none. Are all three children 
to be debarred from marriage on the chance that one or all 
maybe affected? But the difficulty is further complicated. 
The three children, let us say, are perfectly healthy, pass- 
ing into manhood and womanhood without once indicating 
any trace of the disease ; suddenly, in mid-life, the disease 
breaks out, — for w T e are never certain of its non-appearance. 
Again, the three marry, have children, and die, without 
manifesting any of the fatal symptoms of the disease; yet 
their children may all be insane, because the law of atavism 
intervenes to frustrate calculations. 
With such facts before us, consider the straits into which 
we are driven by the novelist's verdict. Three perfectly 
sane people are not to marry because there is a possibility 
of their one day becoming insane, or of their children in- 
heriting the grandfather’s malady. The same difficulty 
meets us in the case of consumption and scrofula , two diseases 
equally transmissible and almost as terrible. Are all the 
families in whom the consumptive “ taint” exists to be 
excluded from marriage? To say so would be to make 
marriage a rarity, since few indeed among English families 
could be found, in which no consumption has appeared 
during two generations. Such difficulties the novelist eludes. 
Yet in real life these difficulties must be met. For our own 
parts, while fully sensible of the responsibility, we frankly 
