788 BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE. 
among the cattle and sheep in that colony. It appeared that, 
though it had a poisonous influence on the human subject, it 
was not fatal to adults, but there were many cases in which 
children had died from eating the berries or other parts of the 
tree. The settlers had sustained serious loss by its ravages 
among their stocks of animals, and they said they would look 
upon the discovery of some antidote for the poison as one of 
the greatest boons which could be conferred upon them. 
ON BREEDING “ IN AND IN.” 
Dr. G. Child read a paper 44 On Marriages of Consanguinity,” 
in which he stated his conviction to be that they are not opposed 
to some unknown law of nature, as contended by some per¬ 
sons— Dr. Darwin and others; that no such law in nature 
existed; and that, on the other hand, where ill effects w ere 
observed to follow upon these unions, they did so by ordinary 
inheritance only. The principal charges, he said, brought 
against marriages of blood were, that they were apt to 
produce sterility, idiocy, insanity, deafness, deformity, and 
scrofula. The question had been examined by both methods 
w hich were applicable to it, viz., that of observation and the 
statistical report of cases, and that of direct and extensive 
experiments in the case of the lower animals. The former 
w T as that upon which the view against the marriages in 
question were based, but it was liable to several sources of 
error, and he believed that the latter method was alone capable 
of affording satisfactory results. The results derived from ex¬ 
periments upon the breeding of animals, and the records of the 
4 Herd Book 5 and the 4 Stud Book, 5 proved incontestably 
that many of the finest horses and horned cattle in England 
during the last hundred years had been bred w ith a degree of 
closeness infinitely greater than was possible in the human 
race. Mr. Child mentioned the case of a flock of sheep bred 
in and in for twenty years with perfectly satisfactory results, 
neither the breed nor the fertility of the animals having 
suffered in the slightest degree; and another case, related in 
the 4 Herd Book, 5 in which one animal had served as the sire 
of four successive generations. In point of fact, the evidence 
derived from the breed of animals, against the hypothesis that 
the mere consanguinity of the parents had an injurious effect 
upon their off spring, was so unambiguous, and so much more 
conclusive than was obtained from observations upon man¬ 
kind in its favour, that unless we were prepared to believe 
that the physiology of reproduction in the human race pro¬ 
ceeded on law ? s altogether different from those by which that 
