Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/119

Rh. In such cases the ultimate outcome is almost absolutely certain, and is noted chiefly by a definite class of tensions and reactions of both mind and body which invariably impress themselves upon progeny, and which for the most part are made obvious in this particular way. No matter how unphysiological such marriages may be, however, they do not necessarily or very often result in the evolution of insanity in the parties contracting them, but rather they do lay the foundation of degenerative tendencies which almost invariably predetermine the development of this affection in more or less remote succeeding generations. Nor do the children of such marriages necessarily or generally become insane, although they sometimes do; but, impressed as these are by the degenerative malnutritions and tensions and reactions of their parents, they tend to exhibit arrests and eccentricities of development, which in turn become intensified in the next, and again, in turn, in all the generations following, until the instability becomes so marked that explosion occurs. In passing, it may be said that the most frequent source of the initiatory tensions and reactions resulting from unphysiological marriage is undoubtedly found in abnormal cohabitation, and the unrest and unsatisfaction and exhaustion resulting therefrom. Such a condition of things begets in perfectly normal people an irritating, nagging, exhausting, persistent erethism, which in time involves the whole organism and deflects it from its norm. Two people enmeshed in such a bond always go to excesses and irregularities, either in abstinence or indulgence; or, if not this, then the whole matter becomes aversional, with straining antipathy, perverting practices, and ideational distrusts and loathings more and more predominating. No wonder that such people predetermine succeeding generations to abnormal sensitiveness, irregular growth, and erratic manifestations in both mental and physical spheres." (See New York Medical Journal for August 14, 1897; also Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, vol. xvii, page 669.)

Now, the outcome of such marriages seems to be a vitiated stream of tendency, which carries with it in its progress from generation to generation certain elements which predetermine to still fuller vitiation, even with incurable insanity, as noted above. Thus, people endowed with such natural characteristics, being altogether too prone to gravitate toward each other, eventually marry, and thus emphasize in progeny the vitiation already doubly initiated. Natures's course demands that such people marry, if at all, into the healthiest, most corrective stock possible. But here immediately there arises not only a scientific prohibition, but an ethical question which should be heeded: Should such people really marry even the best of stock, with the probability of thus vitiating a stream which