Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/81

Rh said in French than in German. Precisely in the same way English beats French. Our sentences don't even require to be finished in order to he understood, because the leading ideas come out first; but, as for old-fashioned tongues, their roundabout construction would be perfectly intolerable. Fancy languages, like Latin and Greek, in which people did not say "yes" or "no." M. de Candolle is very disrespectful to classical Latin. He says that one must have gone through the schools not to be impressed by its ridiculous construction. Translate an ode of Horace literally to an unlettered artisan, keeping each word in its place, and it will produce the effect upon him of a building in which the hall-door was up in the third story. It is no longer a possible language, even in poetry.

I have only space for one more of the many subjects touched upon in his book—that of acquired habits being transmitted hereditarily—and which has also formed the subject of a recent essay by Dr. Carpenter. That some acquired habits in dogs are transmitted appears certain, but the number is very small, and we have no idea of the cause of their limitation. "With man they are fewer still; indeed, it is difficult to point out any one, to the acceptance of which some objection may not be offered. Both M. de Candolle and Dr. Carpenter have spoken of the idiocy and other forms of nervous disorder which, beyond all doubt, afflict the children of drunkards. Here, then, appears an instance based on thousands of observations at lunatic asylums and elsewhere, in which an acquired habit of drunkenness, which ruins the will and nerves of the parent, appears to be transmitted hereditarily to the child. For my own part, I hesitate in drawing this conclusion, because there is a simpler reason. The fluids in an habitual drunkard's body, and all the secretions, are tainted with alcohol; consequently the unborn child of such a woman must be an habitual drunkard also. The unfortunate infant takes its dram by diffusion, and is compulsorily intoxicated from its earliest existence. What wonder that its constitution is ruined, and that it is born with unstrung nerves, or idiotic or insane? And just the same influence might be expected to poison the reproductive elements of either sex. I am also informed, but have not yet such data as I could wish, that children of recent teetotallers who were formerly drunkards are born healthy. If this be really the case, it seems to settle the question, and to show that we must not rely upon the above-mentioned facts as evidence of a once-acquired habit being hereditarily transmitted.—Fortnightly Review.