Eugene S. Talbot

“ 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 [Pg 90] 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. ”

“ If he come from a race well endowed and well formed, he possesses the characters of organisation which his ancestors have given him. He is ready for the combat of life, and to pursue his way by his own virtues and energies. But inversely, if he spring from a stock which is already marked with an hereditary blemish, and in which the development of the nervous system is incomplete, he comes into existence with a badly balanced organisation ”

“ For now by our too much facility in this kind, in giving way for all to marry that will, too much liberty and indulgence in tolerating all sorts, there is a vast confusion of hereditary diseases, no family secure, no man almost free, from some grievous infirmity or other, when no choice is had, but still the eldest must marry, as so many stallions of the race; or if rich, be they fools or dizzards, lame or maimed, unable, intemperate, dissolute, exhaust through riot, as he said, they must be wise and able by inheritance. ”

“ Although sacrificing these important guards against that degeneracy in the body politic which inevitably reflects itself in degeneracy in the individual, this procedure fails to accomplish its end, since it ignores completely the principle of transformation in heredity. The distance between the criminals (whom it is proposed to castrate) and the hysteric offspring of good family is not so great that the progeny of one will not be as degenerate as the progeny of the other. ”

“ The human infant bears precisely the same relation to his species as the simian infant bears to his, and we are bound to conclude that his relation to the future evolution of the race is similar. The human infant presents, in an exaggerated form, the chief distinctive characteristics of humanity—the large head and brain, the small face, the hairlessness, the delicate bony system. ”

“ The egotism of these people is unmarked by the least trace of modesty in obtruding themselves and their assumed good qualities upon the public at every opportunity. They boast of their genius, their righteousness, their goodness of heart, their high sense of honour, their learning and other qualities and acquirements, and this, when they are perfectly aware that they are commonplace, irreligious, cruel, and vindictive, utterly devoid of every chivalrous feeling, and saturated with ignorance. ”

“ Here the intellectual power is less than either that of the moral imbecile or of the paranoiac, twisted though the intellect of the latter be. Loquacious or unusually taciturn, heedless or morbidly cautious, dreamers, wearisome to all brought in contact with them, capricious and unmitigated liars, their qualities are often, in a certain manner, brilliant, but are entirely without solidity or depth. Sharpness and cunning are not often wanting, especially for little things and insignificant intrigues. ”

“ When the child was born and she saw its deformity she instantly exclaimed, “Oh, the intestines of that goat!” At the back of its head the child had a large tumour of the consistency of a loose sac of a bluish colour, showing convolutions interpreted by the mother as a reproduction of the intestinal convolutions that had so shocked her. In reality they were the convolutions of a hernia containing the posterior ends of both cerebral hemispheres. The accidental resemblance of the deformity to the mental impressions was striking. ”

“ There are families in which insanity has existed where the disease has spared the mind in the posterity, but appeared in great strength and eccentricity of the memory and of the passions, or in great perversion of their moral faculties. Sometimes it passes by all the faculties of the mind, and appears only in the nervous system of persons descended from deranged parents; again, madness occurs in children whose parents were remarkable only for eccentricity of mind. Among the diseases that attack the children of the insane, but did not exist in their ancestors, are consumption and epilepsy. ”

“ The first overpowering timidity, the shrinking back to the mother’s breast, followed by curious peers, then by bolder outstretchings of head and arms, mark the stage by which curiosity and interest gain on fear, and finally leave it far behind. Very soon the small, timorous creatures will grow into bold adventurers. ”

“ Yes, and if Jones should marry an insane woman, the chances are good that Jones’s son will turn out crazy, no matter how carefully he may be brought up under the direction of the most eminent psychist, for that little germ which you call ‘a tendency’—so minute that it will elude your most careful scrutiny with scalpel and microscope—is a fixed fact, and will prove more potent than all theories. ”

“ Parents are but too apt from mistaken motives of economy to dismiss the physician at the onset of convalescence. It is precisely at this period that the system hovers between permanent systemic defect and recovery. Proper diet and proper training at this time will often prevent the checking of puberty development, and hence a breakdown under the stress of that period. The same is true of the convalescent period from such diseases in adults. Many a mother has thus injured her constitution and given birth to degenerate children in marked contrast with the normality of the children born before. ”

“ Between the feeble-minded and the normal individual occurs a group whose general characteristics is, as was pointed out by Magnan, a disharmony and lack of equilibrium, not only between the intellectual operations, properly so-called on the one hand, and the emotions and propensities on the other, but even between the intellectual faculties themselves. A degenerate may be a scientist, an able lawyer, a great artist, a poet, a mathematician, a politician, a skilled administrator, and present from a moral standpoint profound defects, strange peculiarities and surprising lapses of conduct. ”

“ Experience has already led to the conclusion that mental and physical overwork increases this defect: hence young brains must not be over-excited with worry or emotionalism. The will of children ought to be cultivated and strengthened. Their minds should be methodically educated. The bodily functions should never be artificially stimulated in any way, to increase unduly the assimilation of the food. Development of the intelligence, the sensibility and the physical training, should be looked after in the same way. Once a plan of living is laid down it should be followed. ”

“ This “social consanguinity” is the great curse which dogs every exclusive tribe and class, 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. ”

“ The passions are unduly a force in the character, which lacks will power. The individual’s higher brain centres are not well inhibited, and he dashes about [Pg 155] like a ship without a rudder, fairly well if the winds be fair and the seas be calm, but dependent on the elements for the character and the time of the final wreck. Invention, poetry, music, artistic taste, philanthropy, intensity, and originality, are sometimes of a higher order among these persons, but desultory, half-finished work and shiftlessness are much more common. ”

“ The male, however, in the higher races, while thus taking on the female intellectual and æsthetic qualities, retains the male sexual characteristics, mentally and physically, but in accordance with the law of evolution, these manifest themselves less explosively as in the case of the female. As the victim of masculinism or feminism is a degenerate the explosive manifestations are more marked. Every one of the stigmata of degeneracy already described may coexist with any one of the three conditions named: infantilism, masculinism, and feminism. ”

“ Owing to the struggle for existence which occurs at puberty between the old type of the chondrocranium and its new type as supplemented by the dermal bones, the nervous system takes a distorted ply which arrests both the bodily, nervous, and mental development at certain points. In infantilism the arrest is of the future promise of the child, so that the body and face remain at the childish point, or the body and nervous system are checked, or finally the nervous system or certain organs alone are checked while the body goes on to full development. ”

“ Prophylaxis of degeneracy in the individual should commence with the birth of the child. Whatever may be said of hypothetical ante-natal training, there is no doubt that considerable benefit can be accomplished during the first months of life. As the great aim of training is to secure self-control, it must be obvious that to accustom an infant to expect attention at every moment it cries, whether the cry be the expression of need or not, is to weaken, not to strengthen, its self-control. ”

“ Great stress has been laid on the dangers of co-education, but the growing opinion is that education limited to one sex is the source of even greater dangers to both boy and girl. It is a matter of common observation among genito-urinary specialists, alienists and gynecologists, that much of the alleged “purity” so ostentatiously displayed by graduates of colleges limited to one sex, is often the offspring of a sexual perversion which, whether congenital or not, has been fostered by the environment of one sex without the modifying, healthy influence of the other. ”

“ You feel yourself swept away on the current of a tranquil river, the depth of which you cannot fathom; it is life itself which is passing, agitating the hearts of men, which are suddenly made bare in the truth and complexity of their movements. ”

“ As you advance in the book, curiosity changes into astonishment, and astonishment into admiration, before this impassive judge, who calls before his tribunal all human actions, and makes the soul render to itself an account of all its secrets. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 assume 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. ”

“ Early involvement of the germ is shown by the fact that the somatic malformations of the hereditary forms of insanity often involve the body elsewhere than in the [Pg 69] nervous axis. The stigmata of heredity—defective development of the uro-genital system, deformities of the face and skull, irregular development of the teeth, misshapen ears and limbs—owe their grave significance to this fact. Like deformities of the brain, these anomalies are also more marked and constant with the lower forms of the hereditarily based systematised perversions of the mind than the higher. ”

“ A struggle for existence, therefore, inevitably results between the tendency of the face to appropriate power of growth and the like tendency of the brain, which, in defective organisms, produces marked reversions of the one for the benefit of the other. ”

“ Recognition of the neurotic tendency often induces the individual to take better care of himself. The youthful appearance may be due largely to arrest of facial development at an early age, the face thus retaining the child character throughout life. Considering, therefore, this class of neurotics, which does not include those afflicted with the more serious nervous disorders such as epilepsy, they may be looked upon as the victims of evolutionary processes that are constantly going on in the race and under civilised conditions. ”

“ In many instances the opposite condition, dwarfism, occurs during infancy from causes which check the further growth of the body, although the general functions remain unchanged. Dwarfism is very apt to be attended by preservation of the intellectual faculties without evidence of degeneracy, other than the egotism shown in extreme vanity. Moral defects are, however, more apt to occur in dwarfism than in giantism, in which last condition mental defect is apt to occur, varying from a simple good-humoured stupidity to feeble-mindedness. ”

“ While in Coolidge’s opinion congenital club-foot unquestionably arises from different causes, it is, however, so frequently an accompaniment of severe forms of mal-development and of congenital brain defects, that there can be no doubt but that imperfect constitutional development is one of its causes. That the deformity with the many limitations which it involves may tend to create morbidness is very likely to be an additional symptom of the degeneracy which, in certain cases, is the underlying cause for the deformity. ”

“ There is hereditary taint in most of these subjects, who are strange in disposition from infancy. As children they frequently shun society and indulge in day-dreams. Their bodily growth is normal, but even trifling disease takes on a cerebral tinge. They may show talent in special directions, but their intelligence rarely passes out of the puerile stage. They often brood over a feminine ideal, a girl who has never encouraged them, and whom they persecute with absurd plans of marriage.
Connecting the paranoiac with the moral imbecile are the so-called “reasoning maniacs.” ”

“ The proportion of the law-made and accidental criminals among the prostitutes is much less than among other criminals, as Merrick has shown. Seduction stands very low in the list of causes. The proportion of the occasional criminal type is very large. Pauline Tarnowsky concludes from her researches, which my own tend to verify, that the prostitute, as a rule, is a degenerate being, the subject of an arrest of development, tainted with a morbid heredity, and presenting stigmata of physical and mental degeneracy fully in consonance with her imperfect evolution. ”

“ As the brain is the last acquirement in vertebrates, considered from the standpoint of necessity, while the face (also a late acquirement) is much less complex, the last, obviously, will present the derangements from degeneration in shape, while the former will show these in shape and function. Furthermore, during the embryonic period the development of the brain will, of necessity, be more immediately affected by degeneracy than the face, which will gain in evolution at its expense. ”