Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/721

Rh should never for a moment permit himself to look upon a member of any neurotic family—that is, one in which insanity, epilepsy, habitual drunkenness, suicide, or imbecility has at any time appeared as a probable, or even possible, partner in marriage. . . . All these diseases, together with neuralgia, hysteria, cancer, and the like, are allied, and, following some law at present unknown to us, replace each other in successive generations, and in different individuals of the same generation, in a manner at present inexplicable."

In the chapter on tubercular disease, the causes which produce the consumptive temperament are given as impure air, drunkenness, and want among the poor; dissipation and enervating luxuries among the rich. This temperament occurs in families that are on the down grade of general decay. Among instinctive criminals, which are regarded as representatives of a decaying race, tubercular disease, very naturally, is found actively at work.

In the concluding chapters of the work it is shown that too early and too late marriages have an injurious effect on the offspring of such unions, while consanguineous marriages injure the children proceeding from them only by intensifying whatever defect may characterize the family to which the parents belong. Attention is called to the fact that unions of the criminal, the dissolute, and the intemperate bring forth children whose degenerate organizations make them burdensome and dangerous to those of more wholesome parentage. On the basis of these facts Dr. Strahan urges those who perceive that they possess any serious constitutional taint to forego marriage, and advocates the confinement of the criminal and habitually drunken so as to prevent the propagation of their kind.

have already noticed the four previous numbers of the author's series of bibliographies of Indian languages—those of the Eskimauan, Siouan, Iroquoian, and Muskogean families. The whole have grown out of an attempt made several years ago to embrace within a single volume an author's catalogue of all the material relating to the native North American languages. Too much material was collected for a single convenient volume, and it was concluded to change the style of publication and issue a series of bibliographies, each relating to one of the more prominent groups of our native languages. The Algonquian-speaking people perhaps covered a greater extent of country than those of any other of the linguistic stocks of North America; and the literature of their languages is greatest in extent of any of the stocks north of Mexico, being equaled, if at all, by only one south of that line, the Nahuatl. Probably every language of the family is on record, and of the more prominent, extensive record has been made. The whole Bible has been printed in the Massachusetts and Cree languages, nearly the whole in the Chippewa and Micmac, and portions of it in a number of others. Rather extensive dictionaries have been printed in Abnaki, Blackfoot, Chippewa, Cree, Delaware, Micmac, and Nipissing, and manuscript dictionaries are in existence of Abnaki, Nipissing, Blackfoot, Chippewa, Cree, Illinois, Massachusetts, Montagnais, and Pottawatomi; grammars of the Abnaki, Blackfoot, Chippewa, Cree, Massachusetts, Micmac, and Nipissing; and manuscript grammars exist of the Illinois, Menomenee, Montagnais, and Pottawatomi. Prayerbooks, hymn-books, tracts, and scriptural texts have appeared in nearly every language of the family; several of them are represented by primers, spellers, and readers; and a geography for beginners was printed in Chippewa in 1840. The present volume contains 2,245 entries of titles, of which 1,926 relate to printed books and articles, and 319 to manuscripts. Of these, 2,014 have been seen and described by the compiler; and of those unseen by him, titles and descriptions of probably half have been received from persons who have actually seen them and described them for him. Many full titles of printed covers are also given, and fac-similes of the original. The author has sought to include everything, printed or in manuscript, relating to the Algonquian languages—books, pamphlets, articles in magazines, tracts, serials, etc., and such reviews and announcements of publications as seemed worthy of notice.