Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/328

322 II., of England, and stands as near the actual Palatine insanity as a nephew.

These six cases would, if occurring in families of ordinary social grade, never make their way into asylum records as exhibiting a congenital tendency, since their close relations were not insane, but here, where we have the family tree and can look up the ancestry, curiously enough we find them all related and through the same source, "Palatine, and this moreover the only one of their many lines of descent in which there was insanity. This is to be thought of when regarding the percentage which runs from twenty to 90 for heredity among the insane, according to the observer, and it should make us think that the higher rather than the lower figures are more likely to be correct.

This condition which caused the extinction of the House of Brunswick in the male line is often considered a common one in aristocracy, that is, a degeneration due to the assumption of rank and power, and consequent tendency to ease, dissipation and decline.

Jacobi has tried to show that the majority of royal and powerful families tend to end in degeneration and sterility. Degeneration without a corresponding pollution of blood, a contamination sufficient in itself to explain the condition I believe to be exceedingly rare, and I may say that there are no instances of such a degeneration among all the royal families that I have studied.

Among the 144 included in this group by reason of close relationship, there are two in (10), three in (9) and seven in (8). These are all centered about within two degrees of relationship of Charles William Ferdinand who was probably the most celebrated of any bearing the name of Brunswick. By making him the center of a group of forty-one, including only those more closely related to him, we find two in (10), three in (9), five in (8), eight in (7), that is of genius and of high talent. This is practically the same group of geniuses that centered about Frederick the Great in Prussia. It seems very probable on the grounds of heredity and entirely unlikely on any other.