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"Poverty, hard work, not infrequent intemperance, and many anxieties added to the sufferings of the period (of gestation) might so press upon the mother as for the time to reduce her to a state of quasi-imbecility. If to this she should have brought to her office of motherhood exhausted vitality, such a condition would provide fruitful soil for such a development of neuroses latent in the mother, as to constitute in her offspring almost a direct inheritance of defect."

Dr. Barr regards tuberculosis as a preeminent cause of defect, in that it lessens all the physical forces and tends to cooperate with any latent neuroses, thus conducing to a condition of "poverty of being" more to be dreaded than the inheritance of actual disease. He finally sums up his view as follows: (84)

"The transmission of imbecility is at once the most insidious and the most aggressive of the degenerative forces, attacking alike the physical, mental, and moral nature, enfeebling the judgment and the will, while exaggerating the sexual impulses and the perpetuation of an evil growth; a growth too often parasitic, ready to unite with any neuroses it may encounter, and from its very sluggishness and inertia refusing to be shaken off, lying latent it may be, but sure to reappear, as Haller recounts, through a century to the fourth and fifth generation."

Dr. Ireland thinks that idiocy is of all mental derangements the most frequently propagated by descent, and agrees with Dr. Barr that the tubercular diathesis is the influence most likely to conduce to it. He points out that the hereditary predisposition alone is, in most cases, insufficient to be the cause of idiocy without the assistance of other influences, and that these influences act with unusual force upon individuals of a neurotic tendency, and they probably determine whether the resultant disease is to be insanity, epilepsy, or deafness, or some other nervous disorder. (85) Again, we learn that the causes of congenital deafness and of epilepsy are much the same as those of idiocy. If we turn to the authorities on epilepsy, we find them reiterating heredity as the chief cause in from one-fourth to one-half of all cases; and as we have already seen, Dr. Brantwaite adds inebriety to the list of these interdependent neuroses. (86) .

(86) p. 80 ante

Mr. F. H. Wines, in discussing a class of unbalanced people on the border line of degeneracy, declares that there is a clear connection between crime, pauperism, insanity, and vice of all sorts, and that all persons of these classes have one characteristic in common: incapacity to govern themselves -- to hold their appetites, instincts, and passions in firm check under the guidance of sound judgment. These unbalanced people are unfit for social life, they cannot make the necessary adjustments, and often make themselves intolerable to others. He finally concludes: "Self-indulgence, egotistic self-gratification, is the root of bitterness from which springs every social ill. It is the mother of degeneracy." (87) Yet the facts just cited would seem to show that it is quite as much the offspring of degeneracy.

When we turn from the palpably defective to measure as accurately as may be the influence of heredity in determining the success or failure of apparently normal individuals, the difficulties are much increased. Homer Folks has remarked that the only experiments which would allow us to test fully the influence of heredity in determining the character of individuals must be made in the cases of infants whose parentage is known and who have been adopted into good homes. (88) The child who is born in an almshouse and grows up there is almost always a pauper, and would probably be so regardless of its heredity, though in such cases the latter agency usually reenforces the influence of environment. The child that grows up in an infant asylum or orphans' home has at most an imperfect opportunity for right development, and the original possibilities of its nature are but faintly reflected by its career. With a child boarded out in a private family, or given to foster parents while still an infant, the conditions of life are better, and more might be inferred if we could compare its characteristics with those of its parents. But usually the facts regarding the parents are matters of inference rather than knowledge, and foster parents are inclined to fix as deep a gulf of ignorance as possible between the child and its progenitors.

Galton has cited the case of D'Alembert, who was a foundling, and put out to nurse as a pauper baby to the wife of a poor glazier: --

"The child's indomitable tendency to the higher studies could not be repressed by his foster-mother's ridicule and dissuasion, nor by the taunts of his schoolfellows, nor by the discouragements of his schoolmaster, who was incapable of appreciating him, nor even by the reiterated, deep disappointment of finding that his ideas, which he knew to be original, were not novel, but long previously discovered by others. Of course we should expect a boy of his kind to undergo ten or more years of apparently hopeless strife, but we should equally expect him to succeed at last; and D'Alembert did succeed in attaining the first rank of celebrity by the time he was twenty-four." (89)