Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/658

640 occurs naturally to all, namely, the necessity for and the high premium set upon physical superiority. Among a people where "all were for the state," and patriotism was the ruling passion, each man held out his life to the state whenever she saw tit to use it, and the state took care that the sword-arm should be well developed. Gunpowder and the implements of modern warfare had not yet rendered all men equal on the battle-field. To have gained a prize at the Olympian games was enough to raise a man, and with him his family, from obscurity into prominence. As the race has progressed, the need for physical force has grown less and less, until at the present day the term physical force, or, as we oftener hear it, brute force, has almost become an opprobrious epithet.

A fallacious notion has somewhere crept in that an intellectual man must be below par physically, and that the one faculty is necessarily cultivated at the expense of the other. The old proverb, mens sana in corpore sano, has been flouted as an absurdity. So much, very briefly, for the first cause of race-degeneration; the second, and the one to which this paper would direct attention, is the influence of hereditary diseases. This factor has never received the attention it should have had at the hands of the writers on social science. The races of which we have been speaking had little of this element to contend with. The weaklings were either deliberately exposed and left to die, as in the case of the Spartans, or if they attained maturity they were held in such low esteem that they willingly kept in the background. Look for a moment at our modern civilization, and mark its diametrically opposite tendency. Every day hospitals are being erected to nurture the diseased and imperfect specimens of our race, and every year thousands of children are by skill and care saved from the death to which Nature would consign them. All this accords with our enlarged notions of humanity, and reflects great credit on the zeal of the philanthropist and the science of the physician, but it exerts a baneful effect on the race. To one who has had access to any large city hospitals, it is a pitiful sight to see the multitude of children who are tided over a few Fears, and sent out into the world branded with an hereditary taint, to propagate their wretched breeds. The limits of this paper will not allow any extended statistics, nor the nature of it warrant a special discussion of hereditary diseases, but there are two whose effects are apparent to all, consumption and insanity. The former, consumption, using the term in its widest sense, has forages produced the most frightful ravages. For example, in England, from 1837 to 1841, of the total number of deaths from all causes sixteen per cent were from consumption. In Philadelphia, from 1840 to 1849, the death-rate was one of consumption to six and a half from all other causes, or about fifteen per cent.

Of late years, however, the mortality has been somewhat reduced by a more successful plan of treatment. As regards insanity "in the