Page:Sexology.djvu/104

 so vast and so interesting, without transcending the limits and the scope of this work. We can but reiterate the warning, that the practice is against the laws of God and man, and therefore unnatural, criminal, and revolting. In the absence of penal enactments on the subject, the inherent punishment should deter every well-informed per- son from the commission of so great an imprudence.

There is, however, another condition generally neglected in the formation of marital alliances, to the great detri- ment of the children who may result from them, and which it is our duty to indicate in this connection. We allude to the "crossing" of temperaments, constitutions, and peculiarities in such a manner that the products may be withdrawn from all danger of hereditary taints, and, by the mingling of the different attributes, peculiar to each of the parents, may escape all organic vices of con- formation. Listen, on this subject, to the words of an authority who is without a superior in these matters :

"Marriages, in the physical point of view, should be so combined as to neutralize, by the opposition of con- stitutions, temperaments, and idiosyncrasies, the elements of morbid inheritance possessed by the parties. The union of two lymphatic, or of two evidently nervous sub- jects, should be forbidden. Two families equally predis- posed to pulmonary affections ought never to mingle their blood. There is the same danger in the union of two sub- jects affected with general debility, etc. A predisposition to analogous affections constitutes, in the eyes of the physician, another incompatibility in marriage. Scrofula and consumption would form a sordid nursery; while a woman issued from consumptive parents, hut married to a robust and healthy man, may become the happy mother of a valid generation, which, crossed in its turn with