Degeneracy Part 5

While these figures seem very demonstrative, they contain a great many elements of error. One of these is incidentally pointed out by Arthur Mitch.e.l.l,[116] who finds that under favourable conditions of life the apparent ill effects of consanguineous marriages are frequently almost nil, whilst if the children are ill-fed, badly housed and clothed, the evil may become very marked. He calculates that the percentage of consanguineous marriages generally in Scotland is 13, or ten times less than with the parents of idiots. Taking his figures a strong case seems to be made out in support of the opinion that idiocy, among other evils, results from intermarriage. Langdon Down, although his figures are not of so unfavourable a character, admits consanguinity as one of the causes of deterioration.

George H. Darwin concluded from a careful investigation that about 4 per cent. of all marriages in England are between first cousins, and between 2 and 3 per cent. in the smaller towns and in the country; with these he compared the rate of similar marriages among the parents of lunatics and idiots in asylums, and found it to be about 3 or 4 per cent.--not higher, therefore, than in the general population.

Huth[117] cites instances occurring regularly at the present day among certain isolated communities (St. Kilda, Pitcairn, and Iceland) without apparent evil consequences to the race. Such marriages were common among the North American Indians and the South Sea Islanders, people among whom idiocy and other degenerate hereditary conditions were remarkably rare.

These cases, Strahan remarks, deal with peculiarly healthy communities.

Therein lies the secret of such intermarriage proving innocent of evil to the offspring. Were such intermarriage common among the degenerates the result would be disastrous.

In 1869 the New York State Medical Society[118] appointed a committee to investigate the influence of consanguineous marriages upon the offspring.

Their results show clearly that if the family be free from degenerate taint, marriage among its members in no way diminishes the chances of healthy offspring. This conclusion is in accord with the findings of recent investigators like Anstie, George Darwin, and A. H. Huth, according to whom there is no greater amount of morbidity or abnormality among the offspring of consanguineous parents than among the children of parents not so related, provided the parents be equally free from tendency to disease or degeneration. With a perfectly healthy stock, as every breeder of animals knows, remarks Strahan,[119] "in-and-in breeding" may be practised with impunity, but where the stock is tainted with disease or imperfection, safety is only to be found in "crossing."

Where the error lay in the old doctrine, upon which was founded the prohibition of consanguineous unions, was not, as Strahan remarks, in a.s.serting that disease and deformity were more often met with in children of these than in those of other unions, for such is true, but attributing these unhappy results to the mere fact that the parents were related by blood. Over and above the fact that these consanguineous marriages are almost certain to transmit in an accentuated form any defect or tendency to disease already present in the family, there is no physiological reason why such marriages should not take place. Breeders of prize stock frequently breed "in and in," not only with impunity, but with marked benefit. But this fact, while going to prove that it is not the mere blood relationship of the parents which induces the degeneration so often found in the children of consanguineous marriages, can but rarely be advanced as an argument in support of the marriage of blood relations. The stock-raiser only permits the more perfect members of his flocks and herds to continue their kind, and for this reason the "in-and-in" breeding is innocuous, just as it would be in the human family under like conditions.

But where shall we find the perfect human family? Such families are certainly rare. The laws of natural life have been so strained and perverted that almost every family nowadays has a taint or twist of some kind, and as all such imperfections are transmitted and rapidly deepened and fixed in the family by the intermarriage of its members, it is best that such unions should be forbidden.

Recently acquired characters, whether physiologic or pathologic, are very liable to disappear when the individual bearing such characters intermarries with another not having the same character. The natural tendency in all such cases is to revert in the offspring to the normal or healthy type, so that unless the new character be very deeply impressed upon the parental organism it is almost certain it will not appear in the offspring, if the other parents have nothing of the character. But when both parents are possessed of the character, whether it be physiologic or pathologic, this natural tendency to revert to the original is often overborne and the character is repeated in an accentuated form in the offspring.

Now this accentuation of all family characters is what must always happen in the case of consanguineous marriages. If there be any taint in the family each member of the family will have inherited more or less of it from the common ancestor. Take the case of cousins, the descendants of a common grandparent who was insane and of an insane stock. Here the cousins are certain to have inherited more or less of the insane diathesis. Even if the taint has been largely diluted in their case by the wise, or, more likely, fortunate marriages of their blood-related parents, yet will they have inherited a certain tendency to nervous disease, and if they marry they must not be surprised if that taint appears in an aggravated form in their children. Some of the children of such parents are generally idiotic, epileptic, dumb, or lymphatic, and the parents marvel whence came the imperfection. It may be in some cases that the parents, and possibly the grandparent, of the unfortunate children, have not up till that time displayed any outward evidence of the tendency to disease which they have inherited and handed on to their descendants; and, not looking farther back, the parents boldly a.s.sert that such a thing as insanity, epilepsy, scrofula, &c., is unknown to their family. They themselves have never been insane; why, then, should their children? In like manner children may be epileptic, blind, deaf-mute, lymphatic, cancerous, criminal, drunkards, or deformed from direct inheritance, and yet the family line be honestly declared to be healthy. Hence the truth of Sir William Aitken's maxim, that "a family history including less than three generations is useless and may even be misleading." From the foregoing it is evident that the similarity of temperament induced by a common environment, and which Strahan would call "social consanguinity," must be a potent factor in the production of all hereditary degenerations. Living under similar customs, habits and surroundings, labouring at the same occupation, indulging in the same dissipation, tend to engender like diseases and degenerations, irrespective of any blood relationship. Hence it not seldom happens that persons not even distantly related by blood are, in reality, much more nearly related in temperament than cousins, or even nearer blood relations who have experienced widely different modes of life. This "social consanguinity" is the great curse which dogs every exclusive tribe and cla.s.s, and hurries them to extinction. It has largely aided real or family consanguinity in the production of the diseases and degenerations which have so heavily fallen upon the aristocracies and royal families of Europe.

A crucial test of the opposing positions taken respectively in such a positive manner by Bemiss and Strahan would be a family intermarrying extensively, but placed under favouring conditions unlikely of themselves to create degeneracy. Excellent cases of this kind are furnished by Bourgeois[120] and Thiebault.[121] Bourgeois gives the history of his own family, which was the issue of a union of the third degree of consanguinity. During the ensuing 160 years there were ninety-one marriages, of which sixteen were consanguineous. All of these latter were productive. There was not a single case of malformation, or other physical or mental disease in the offspring.

Thiebault reports the case of a slave-dealer who died in the year 1849 at Whidah, Dahomey, leaving behind him four hundred disconsolate widows, and about one hundred children. By the order of the king the whole family were interned in a particular district, where reigned the most complete promiscuity. In 1863 there were children of the third generation.

Thiebault, after verifying these facts, states that at that time, although these people were born from all degrees of incestuous unions, there was not a single instance of deaf-mutism, albinism, blindness, cretinism, or other congenital malformation. From these cases it is evident that the position of Strahan is not too strongly taken.

While it is true that "like clings to like," still this does not imply kinship, but it very often implies likeness in mental characteristics.

This tendency has been shown to be present in the neurotic by Roller,[122]

De Monteyel,[123] Kiernan,[124] Bannister,[125] and Manning,[126] so far as Germany, France, the United States, and Australia are concerned.

Bannister puts the statistical proof of this tendency very forcibly as follows: "There are in Illinois, according to the most recent estimates, in round numbers, about 6,000 insane, or one to a little over 500 of the population. Even if we double, treble, or quadruple this frequency to include all that have been or are to be insane, as well as those insane at the present time, it would not appear that there was much probability of two insane persons being married according to any ordinary law of chances.

In fact, we find four out of the 104 with insane heredity had both father and mother insane. In one of these cases the insane heredity involved both parents and both grandparents on each side, though in the case of the latter the histories show it only as collateral. Besides these, three patients had direct paternal and collateral maternal heredity; two had direct maternal and collateral paternal heredity, and in one case there was collateral heredity of insanity on both sides. This makes altogether nearly 10 per cent. of those with insane heredity with it on both sides, maternal and paternal, and thus favoured with a double opportunity to inherit mental disease. If we add to this the instances where, with insanity of one parent, there is reported either epilepsy, hysteria, or drunkenness, 'brain disease,' nervousness, &c., of the other, the ratio of double inheritance rises to over 20 per cent."

The beneficial effects which may result from atavism are, it will be obvious, offset by this tendency of the neurotic to intermarry, thus perverting the principle of atavism to the a.s.sistance of degeneracy.

The age of the parent plays a part in degeneracy. Conger[127] (whose results have been corroborated by Joseph Workman, of Toronto, and Kiernan,[128] of Chicago) points out that in all degenerative forms we must take into consideration this factor, since it determines the development of degeneracy in childhood. Hereditary taint may be transmitted to descendants as a simple neuropathy, as a neurosis, or as a defect of development reaching even to idiocy. Conger finds the prevailing age, especially the age of the mothers of degenerates, is often between twenty and twenty-five years, and that hence there exists a relation between this age and the greater transmission of degeneracy to the offspring. Marro, who has specially investigated the influence of the age of the parents, both in the normal population and among criminals,[129]

finds that among all cla.s.ses of criminals there is an excess of immature parents (under 26) or senile parents (over 40), and that only petty offenders possessed a normal number of mature parents (26 to 40 years). A man between 20 and 25 is in as favourable condition for procreating degenerates as the very aged. Because of incompleted organic development he has been unable to free himself from hereditary taint which he transmits to his descendants, but which in maturer age, through the influence of adaptation, evolution, or education, might perhaps be more or less notably modified.

The organism between 20 and 25 is yet incomplete; education has not been able to exert much influence in determining those possible changes which are adapted to modify congenital tendencies. In a word, the individual between 20 and 25 feels too much the influence of atavic characters, and too readily transmits to his posterity the brands of degeneracy.

Experience has made it well known that the children of the aged readily show degenerate types. Many children of old fathers have undoubtedly inherited all the characters of the weakness of the age in which they were begotten. Old age represents the period of retrogression, of involution, and hence readily transmits the mark of degeneracy. The children of either too young or too old parents, failing to escape hereditary predisposition, may from birth inherit those characters which are proper to incomplete organic development or to the period of involution.

Kiernan has had under observation a Nova Scotian family of Scotch extraction, the mother of which continued to bear children until she was 63 years old. There had been no pregnancy between 50 and 56. At 56 a son was born who had ear, jaw and skull stigmata, and became a periodical lunatic at 25. A son, born a year after, was a six-fingered idiot, with retinitis pigmentosa. (These last expressions of degeneracy are, as Darier[130] has shown, often a.s.sociated. Darier's cases had the following hereditary antecedents: One father had hemeralopia; one mother had defective vision; a grandfather was blind at 30; a grandfather was blind in one eye, and an uncle had congenital iris coloboma. Only one patient examined did not have hemeralopic descendants. Six patients examined belonged to five different families, all consisting of five or six children, one-third of whom had hemeralopia. Among thirty-five children there were eleven hemeralopes and two six-fingered children, who died too young to determine the existence of retinitis pigmentosa. The disease in all began in childhood, and hemeralopia was absent in but one case.) Three of the next children (two boys and a girl) became paralytic idiots in infancy. Here the degeneracy was expressed in that tendency to miliary aneurismal weakness of arteries to which E. C. Spitzka,[131] called attention over a decade ago. One of the next children was a periodically s.e.xual invert female. The last child was an epileptic. The children born before the age of fifty were normal and averaged 60 years of age.

Matthews Duncan,[132] Arthur Mitch.e.l.l, and Langdon Down, have called attention to the influence of premature and late marriage in the production of idiocy. Factors capable of producing idiocy are of course capable of producing less decided expressions of degeneracy.

CHAPTER V

INTERMIXTURE OF RACES

Defoe, in his _Trueborn Englishman_, outlines a factor of great importance in degeneracy.[133] Race intermixture is much more common than is generally believed, owing to that ethnologic error consequent on the discovery of Sanscrit, which tests race by speech. Keane[134] excellently explodes this error by the following table:

Peoples. Race. Speech.

English Kelto-Teutonic Teutonic Scotch Kelto-Teutonic Teutonic Cornish Siluro-Kelto-Teutonic Teutonic Irish (West) Siluro-Kelto-Teutonic Keltic Welsh Siluro-Kelto-Teutonic Keltic French Ibero-Kelto-Teutonic Italic Spanish Ibero-Keltic Italic Germans Slavo-Kelto-Teutonic Teutonic Bohemians Kelto-Teuto-Slavonic Slavonic Russians (many) Finno-Slavonic Slavonic Hungarians Ugro-Slavonic Slavonic Bulgarians Ugro-Teuto-Slavonic Finnic Prussians (East) Letto-Teuto-Slavonic Teutonic Rumanians Italo-Slavo-Illyric Italic Italians Liguro-Kelto-Italic Italic

Profoundly mixed as this table indicates European races to be, it is far from representing the full extent of race mingling. The primitive worship of the Slavonic Czernebog by the Saxons in England demonstrates a Slavonic strain, derivable, as Kiernan[135] remarks, from their contact with the Wends of the Baltic. Not merely are the Aryan races of Europe mixed together, but the blood of all has a pre-Aryan and a Turanian dash. In Great Britain, as Taylor[136] and others have shown, the Iberian type is found in Wales and Scotland as well as elsewhere, though in lesser degree.

These admixtures date back to palaeolithic times when, although, as Keane remarks, the predominant type of skull was dolicocephalic (or long-headed), the brachycephalic (or round-headed type) had begun to appear in America, then connected by land with both Africa and Europe. In the subsequent neolithic time, while the type is at first generally brachycephalic, it soon becomes mesatocephalic (mixed long and round-headed), pure brachycephals and dolicocephals becoming rare. Vogt went so far as to maintain that were the three chief anthropoid apes developed further, two dolicocephalic and one brachycephalic type of man would result; the first two from the chimpanzee and gorilla, the last from the orang. The orang descendant would have long arms and red hair. The chimpanzee descendant would be of small size, dark colour with slender bones and jaws. The gorilla race would have ma.s.sive chest, big bones, ma.s.sive jaws and teeth. These three types appear in Great Britain and Ireland and traces of their blood are still detectable in living men. Sir Walter Scott draws an excellent picture of the "orang" type in _Rob Roy_, whose hero, according to reliable tradition, represented the Pict type.

Gomme[137] has lately shown that these races persisted long enough to stamp their savage beliefs on coming races and intermingled with them. The Neolithic race in Great Britain was dark, of feeble build, short stature, with dolicocephalic skulls. This race remained to the historic period, as the Silures in Great Britain and the Firbolgs in Ireland. It had high cheek-bones and oblique eyes, as Kiernan[138] points out. Towards the middle of the neolithic period this race was conquered by a brachycephalic, tall, long-armed, muscular race, with florid complexion and yellowish or red hair.[139] Scott's _Rob Roy_ is an example of this type. A third race of fair complexion with prognathous face, dolicocephalic skulls, of tall stature, great bones, great chest development and ma.s.sive jaws, later invaded Great Britain. While these races resemble Vogt's hypothetical descendants of the anthropoid apes, it should be stated that there is not the slightest evidence for this line of descent. Writers who ignore these race characteristics have often brought serious criticism and even discredit on the doctrine of degeneracy.

Lombroso, starting from the correct premise, that wide departure from the race type is evidence of degeneracy, erroneously cites in ill.u.s.tration Virchow's departure from the German type, Byron's departure from the English type, O'Connell's dolicocephalic departure from the mesatocephalic Irish type, and Robert Bruce's neanderthaloid departure from the Scandinavian type. As Kiernan has shown,[140] Virchow, as his name denotes, is a German-speaking Slavonic Wend; Byron was a Celto-Scandinavian Scotchman; O'Connell was born in a district conquered by the tall dolicocephalic race which invaded Ireland. The Bruce type of skull is still found among the purer Norwegians, Frisians, Swedes, and Danes, and was common just before his day and just after, as has been shown by Taylor.

As the intermingling of races began early, the question of the existence of pure races to-day, or even during the historic period, is an open one.

The Hebrews have been comparatively pure since the return from the Captivity. Before that, as the history of Solomon's foreign marriages demonstrates, they were a raceless chaos, the Semitic element predominating. Researches by Flinders Petrie[141] and others show that the Egyptians were a mixture of Turanians, Hamites, Aryan and Semite peoples imposed on a negroid basis. When these elements were finally fused, the race bred relatively true, although the lower cla.s.ses tend to the negroid type and the higher to the Caucasic.

The Koreans, as Keane remarks, are a mixture of two primitive races, one white and one yellow. The j.a.panese, whose ancestors emigrated to j.a.pan from Korea are, according to Topinard,[142] the product of the addition of three distinct types to that forming their Korean ancestors. The Caucasic to a small extent, the Polynesian to a greater, and the Malay to a still greater, are mixed with the original Korean.

The Chinese are neither a h.o.m.ogeneous people nor a pure race, albeit the relatively few Mantchus are dominant. The Aryan of India, on whom Max Muller laid such stress, is known to be, despite a rigid caste system, a non-Aryan race, feebly infused with a modic.u.m of Aryan blood. The so-called "Gypsy" seems, of all the races of India, to have retained most Aryan speech and type as well as its original semi-nomadic waggon-journeying tendencies in the midst of settled civilisation. Ghetto seclusion long helped to preserve relative purity of race in the Jew, but despite vagabond surroundings the "Gypsy" has remained even purer.

Great as has been the mixture of even widely separated types like the three races described as mingling in Great Britain and Ireland, even greater admixture occurred in comparatively late historic times. The so-called Scotch-Irish (whose blood enters so largely into the dominant race of the United States) are, despite their speech (much more Teutonic and monosyllabic than English), as Kiernan[143] has shown, a raceless chaos of Gaelic and Cymric Celts, Lowland Scotch, French Huguenots, Danes (Celto-Teuto-Slaves),[144] Palatinate Germans, Magyars, English Puritans, Hollanders, Swedes, Protestant Italians, Poles, and Spaniards. The intermixture of the dark, small-boned, dolichocephalic, orthognathous (with in-drawn jaws) race first with the brachycephalic, prognathous, big-boned, red-haired race, and then with the dolichocephalic prognathous, deep-chested, big-boned, fair race, must have produced in the British Isles as marked variations in type as now occur from the admixture of the Indian and negro. These are especially noticeable in the Marshpee Indians of Cape Cod, the Long Island tribes and the "Red Bones" of South Carolina.

The Marshpee tribe is an admixture of Anglo-Saxon, Portuguese, Indian, and negro. The Indian element, while still demonstrable, is lessening. Some of the older people still retain Indian characteristics. A girl of ten was negro in all respects except her hair. An adult whose mother was half white, half Marshpee, while the father is negro, had all the negro characteristics except the skin, which was Indian in type, and the jaws, which were slender. Another adult who had a negro great-grandfather, Marshpee mother, and a three-fourths Marshpee father, had large, negro-like jaws, Indian hair, skin, and cheek-bones. Another adult had a Portuguese maternal grandmother, negro grandfather, an Indian-white paternal grandmother and Indian-negro paternal grandfather. His hair, jaws, and nose were negro, his cheek-bones were high, his upper and lower jaws met so that the front teeth occluded.[145] The like condition obtains in the Long Island Indians, but to a less extent with the "Red Bones,"

who, after the type was formed, avoided admixture with the negro.

The influence of race intermixture in the production of degeneracy is easily settled. Basing their opinion on the notorious sterility of the hybrid offspring of the horse and a.s.s, certain biologists have a.s.sumed like results in man and have cited the alleged absence of Australian half-breeds in evidence. Since the hare and rabbit, dog and wolf, sheep and goat produce breeds intermediate between the parents, fertile while environment is unchanged, horse and a.s.s sterility cannot be accepted as of much value in settling the question. Recent researches have shown that the half-breeds which survived birth among the Australians were killed in accordance with tribal usages regulating population in accordance with food supply.

Whether the results of race intermixture prove degenerate or not will turn largely on the environment. The mulatto is certainly better adapted to the white environment than the pure negro, albeit less so than the white. That race intermixture may, however, determine degeneration, is shown by the relapse into voodooism and cannibalism of the Haiti and Louisiana French hybrids, and the Anglo-Saxon hybrids of Liberia, who contrast disadvantageously with the Arabianised Moslem Mandingoes and Veys, which last have advanced so far as to devise a system of writing. The extent of the influence of environment is shown in the career of the Dumas family, which is of Haitian-negro origin. The grandfather was a general in the French army, the father and son were two stars in the literary firmament.

The sculptor, Edmonia Lewis, was of similar stock to these. Evidences of degeneracy were rare among the Marshpee Indians, as I have elsewhere shown.[146]

The Abyssinians have preserved that antique type of Christianity which had Jewish usages; they had their own literature, alphabet, and old type of civilisation. According to Keane, the present inhabitants of Abyssinia form an extremely complex ethnical group in which it is not always possible to distinguish the const.i.tuent elements. The prevailing colour is a distinct brown, shading northwards to a light, olive, fair complexion, southwards to a deep chocolate and an almost sooty black.

There are Abyssinians who may certainly be called black, and in whom the negro strain is revealed in the somewhat tumid lip, small nose, broad at base, and frizzly, black hair. But the majority may be described as a mixed Hamito-Semitic people, who, beyond question, belong fundamentally to the Caucasic division. While the Hamitic, Semitic, and the Latin branch of the Aryans are admitted to form a fertile, progressive admixture with the negro, the reverse is commonly a.s.sumed to be the case with the English speaking Celto-Teutons. Daniel Wilson[147] is of opinion that this is not true as to millions of the coloured race who now const.i.tute the indigenous population of the Southern States. They are at home there in a climate to which the white race adapts itself with very partial success. The offspring of white fathers and of mothers of the African races, they have multiplied to millions; and now, with the recently acquired rights of citizenship, and with the advantage of education within their reach, the country is their town. The very social prejudices against miscegenation protect them from the effacing influence to which the Indian half-breed is exposed, by ever-recurrent intermarriage with the dominant race. As yet there are discernible the various degrees of heredity from the mulatto to the quinteron. But the abolition of slavery has placed the coloured race on an entirely new footing. Left as it now is, free to enjoy the healthful, social relations of a civilised community, and protected, by the very prejudices of race and caste, from any large intermixture with the white race, it can scarcely admit of doubt that there will survive on the American Continent a Melanochroi of its own, more distinctly separated from the white race, not only by heredity but also by climate influences, than the "dark Whites" of Europe are from the blonde types of h.e.l.lenic, Slavic, Teutonic, or Scandinavian stock. This condition will be modified by the fact that the negro American, like the others, is a traveller and, with a rise of culture, tends to city life.

The admixture with the white has reduced negro prognathism and dolichocephaly. It must, however, be admitted that these reductions had already been begun in Africa. Sir H. H. Johnston, however, fully agrees with the negro writer[148] who holds that the "pure and unadulterated Negro cannot, as a rule, advance with any certainty of stability above his present level of culture; that he requires the admixture of a superior type of man." But the white and black races are "too widely separated in type to produce a satisfactory hybrid"; hence Johnston thinks that, "the admixture of yellow that the Negro requires should come from India, and that Western Africa and British Central Africa should become the America of the Hindu. The mixture of the two races would give the Indian the physical development which he lacks, and he, in his turn, would transmit to his half Negro offspring the industry, ambition, and aspiration toward a civilised life which the Negro so markedly lacks."

On the whole, race intermixture will not tend to elevate the race where there is a decided difference in the state of evolution of the two races, and moreover especially where, as is usually the case, the mother is of the inferior race. It must be obvious that, given a negro pelvis and the head of a white, results damaging to the offspring cannot but occur. And these results are of a nature likely to be transmitted by heredity. The same would hold true with other races as well. Although the differences between the Hawaiian and the white are much less than those between the negro and the white, it is notorious that while the labours with pure Hawaiians are easy, those with half-whites are difficult. The same conditions have been observed from time to time between different breeds of dogs, whose pelves vary. Therefore it is safe to a.s.sume that admixtures of races of different grades of evolution will, if carried to any great extent, tend to render the superior race more liable to the action of the factors producing degeneracy. Dixon[149] has shown that mulatto families tend to disappear, if they be not crossed with either black or white, and that the limit of descent is the fourth generation. He has also pointed out that morbid proclivities and retrogressive tendencies are peculiarly rife among mulattoes. The fact, long ago shown by Menatta,[150] that the conflict for existence between brain growth and reproductive organ growth at p.u.b.erty, results, in the mulatto, as in the negro and anthropoids, in the triumph of the reproductive, indicates that the mulatto has factors of degeneracy which would be fatal to the establishment of an intermediate type on the environment of the white. While Menatta is in error in regarding skull mal-development as the cause, when it and brain growth disturbance are defects due to the same cause, still general observation supports his opinion that "negro children are sharp, intelligent, and full of vivacity, but on approaching the adult period a gradual change sets in.

The intellect seems to become clouded, animation giving place to a sort of lethargy, briskness yielding to indolence. We must necessarily infer that the development of the negro and white proceeds on different lines. While with the latter the volume of brain grows with the expansion of the brain pan, in the former the growth of the brain is, on the contrary, arrested by the premature closing of the cranial sutures and laternal pressure of the frontal bone." Since, as Havelock Ellis remarks,[151] even the highest races do not fulfil the promise of evolution they make before p.u.b.erty, anything which tends still further to impede the fulfilment must be regarded as a factor of degeneracy. Hence intermixture with an inferior race, having an inferior type of pelvis, would tend to degeneracy.

CHAPTER VI

TOXIC AGENTS

The toxic agents which influence the race toward degeneracy, exert that deterioration in a mode which closely resembles that of the degenerative powers of the acute and chronic contagions and infections. The acute poisonings by these toxic agencies resemble the acute, nervous and other exhaustion caused by the toxin of the germs underlying the infections and contagions. The chronic conditions due to these toxic agents agree in many respects with the chronic states produced by the infections and contagions. The toxic agencies are divisible into those belonging to the condiments, medicines, foods and beverages, and those arising from occupations.

Tobacco is the most common, while alcohol and opium contend for second place both as to use and as to deleterious effects. Alcohol has been repeatedly charged with being _the_ factor in degeneracy. Statistics of the first half of the present century seem to justify the conclusion that it is apparently the most potent factor, yet these statistics as a rule confound coincidence and cause, or effect and cause, or the vicious circles thereby resulting, to a remarkable degree. There are but few races in which alcohol has not been used and abused. The American Indians[152] had tizwein, chica, and pulque long ere Columbus; the Tartars and Russians, bouza, kvas, and k.u.myss; the South Sea Islanders ava and toddy (from the cocoanut); the Tunisians, laymi. The vast majority of the races of mankind have used alcoholic beverages. Each was called by a local name and not by a loan word, a most demonstrable evidence of local origin.

Even the social insects (bees and ants) at times indulge in fruit ferments. The claim, therefore, that alcohol is the product of high civilisation, hence of recent origin, and hence peculiarly destructive, is untenable. That excess in alcohol frequently occurs in degenerate stocks is, however, undeniable. But as Krafft-Ebing, Kiernan, Spitzka and others have shown, intolerance of alcohol is an expression of degeneracy. The person intolerant of alcohol becomes either a total abstainer because of a personal idiosyncrasy (like that which forbids certain people to eat sh.e.l.l-fish lest nettle-rash occur), or because of parsimony, or for both reasons combined. Such total abstainers leave degenerate offspring in which degeneracy a.s.sumes the type of excess in alcohol as well as even lower phases. The race tests of the deteriorating influence of alcohol are practically valueless, nor are statistics concerning alcoholism in the ancestry of degenerates of much more use. The enormous amount of idiocy, for example, in the Scandinavian countries, charged by Huss, Langdon Down and others to alcoholism in the parents, has been, by the most recent researches, cut down by Roof to less than 7 per cent. Insane hospital statistics vary to a like degree. Bad faith, however, is out of the question in these statistics. Lack of a.n.a.lytic skill, and that dangerous unscientific, canting, philanthropic tendency which rebels at statistics unfavourable to preconceived sociologic theories, explain these discrepancies. The ignoring of all but the alcoholic factor produces also great elements of error. Kiernan[153] cites twenty-three cases in which degenerate stocks were charged to alcoholic parentage, but which on a.n.a.lysis proved to be due to a degenerative factor in the parents of which alcoholism was merely an expression. Nearly all the offspring born after inebriety were prematurely born, defective, epileptic, hysteric, insane, idiots or criminals. Some few were healthy, apart from their intolerance of alcohol. In eighteen cases both father and mother were alcoholists. The fathers in four of these cases had been temperate, industrious, and affectionate ere being sunstruck. Following this came periods of irritability, excessive drinking and spendthriftiness. The mothers had remained for some years after the fathers' breakdown free from the use of alcohol, but were nervously exhausted from the strain. One became depressed during pregnancy, was given gin for the depression, and the habit persisted after the delivery. In the three other cases painful menses developed during the nervous exhaustion. The popular prescription for these, gin, was given, with the result of producing inebriety. In ten cases skull injury to the father had like results on both mother and father. In two cases the mother became a victim of painful menstruation after a railroad accident; gin drinking, to relieve this, followed and became a habit. The father's nervous system broke down under the strain and both became inebriates. In two other cases nervous exhaustion from typhoid and typhus fever produced the same outcome in inebriety on the part of the father and mother. In the remaining cases the inebriety was an expression of nerve exhaustion after various protracted infections. The alcoholism in these cases was clearly an expression of the factors of race deterioration producing degeneracy, and not its cause.

The influence of alcohol must therefore first be studied on the individual to determine its value and method of action as a cause of race deterioration. Careful medical researches have shown that alcohol produces a nervous state, closely resembling that induced by the contagions and infections, often accompanied with mental disturbance (delirium tremens and acute types of insanity). The acute nervous state to which the term alcoholism was applied by Magnus Huss has all the essential characteristics of the nervous state due to the contagions and infections.

There is, however, a greater tendency to impotence and sterility in the alcohol nervous state than in the others, and consequently a lesser influence on race deterioration. The condition, moreover, has a tendency to set into action degenerative tendencies latent in the liver and kidneys. This action of alcohol on the liver and kidneys so interferes with their functions as to produce the effect already described as resulting in the contagions and infections from their toxins. Alcohol exerts a similarly deteriorating influence on the ant.i.toxin-forming organs (especially on the t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, ovaries and their appendages), to that already described as exerted by the toxins of the contagions and infections. To the direct toxic effects of alcohol are therefore added results of imperfect liver and kidney action and defective strengthening powers from deficient ant.i.toxin secretion. Like all toxic agents, alcohol interferes with the functions of the eye and ear nerves. Special weakness thus created is transmissible to the offspring. The chronic type of alcoholism may well be compared in its effect with chronic contagions.