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custom is usual in these days; the civil law makes no mention of it in any country.

8. Consequently, in the present state of science and in a physiological point of view, we are not authorised to blame marriages between first cousins: it is a question to be discovered whether it may be useful to recommend them, now that the dispersion of families makes moral and domestic conditions so different from what they formerly were; for if, on the one hand, everything tends to make us believe that healthy consanguinity is favourable to the offspring, it may be that morbid consanguinity would be unfavourable to them.

APPENDIX.*

DOCTOR ANCELON communicated to the Académie des Sciences, on the 18th of January, some remarks on the value of statistics as applied to consanguineous marriages. There has been, no doubt, a great deal of discussion lately on this subject. To what purpose? Are we favoured, now-a-days, with some new social reason? Are these marriages now more frequent than in former days? That which astonishes us is not the number of evils imputed to consanguineous marriages, but the enormous quantity of these marriages which have been noticed since the subject has been mooted; and above all, the lengthened observations which, they say, have been made upon them. Is it not surprising, for example, that all of a sudden, in a small rural district of La Meurthe, fifty-four consanguineous marriages. have been met with and examined, with the following consequences :—

1. Marriages which have been sterile

2. Marriages whose issue has died before the age
of puberty

3. Marriages which have produced children afflicted
with scrofula, tubercles, deaf-muteness, etc.
4. Marriages whose issue has required no particular
observation

14

7

18

15

54

What must we infer from this? Assuredly these data would be very alarming if we could only look at them from one point of view, and neglect the multiplicity of causes of degeneracy introduced into society since the end of the last century. But the registrars of sta

* Dr. Dally, the learned author of this memoir, has been good enough to forward me the following report of a paper on the same subject, read before the Academy on the 18th January. It is so valuable, that I have not hesitated to translate the whole of it. (TR.)

tistics have, perhaps, hardly considered what would become of their statistical display if the question is reconsidered. Are they uneasy as to what they would discover in examining non-consanguineous marriages? While waiting until, if possible, a statement of consanguineous marriages, contracted anterior to 1800, be made, we are called upon to examine contemporaneous non-consanguineous marriages, of which we have here the results.

Dieuze, with a population of 3,700 souls, can count only four consanguineous marriages, the consequences of which we will examine farther on; as to the non-consanguineous marriages, they are analysed in the following manner :—

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44.93

3. Marriages whose issue has died be-
fore the age of puberty

4. Marriages which have given rise to
no particular observations

The balance here is not favourable to non-consanguineous marriages; and that nothing may be wanting in our manner of proof, let us examine our four consanguineous marriages. The first of these marriages, between first cousins, dating some thirty odd years ago, has remained sterile. The three others, which have also been between first cousins, came from the same stock. From the first consanguineous marriage there were born five children-three boys and two girls. The eldest of the boys married his first cousin, who has borne him two healthy children: the second, aged twenty-five, is still a bachelor; the third died of epilepsy at the age of twenty. As to the youngest daughter, married to her first cousin a little before her eldest sister, she has already three healthy children. Except the epileptic patient, whom we mentioned above, all the other members of this numerous consanguineous family have enjoyed the most flourishing health up to this time, with the exception of two, who have died of acute pneumonia.

After all this, and until we obtain the double series of statistics of which we have just given a specimen, we believe we have a right to conclude that we must search elsewhere for the causes of the degeneracy with which some people endeavour to charge consanguineous marriages.

109

PEYRERIUS, AND THEOLOGICAL CRITICISM.

"Veritas laborat sæpe, extinguitur nunquam."

LIVY, Hist., xxii, 39, 19.

"Die Inquisition kommt nicht auf. Wir sind nicht gemacht, wie die Spanier, unser Gewissen tyrannisiren zu lassen." GÖTHE, Egmont, i, 1.

AFTER two centuries of neglect and oblivion, the name of Isaac de la Peyrère is once more received and honoured, as that of the first scholar who broke through the meshes of a groundless traditional prejudice, and proved that even in Scripture there are no decisive evidences of man's descent from a single pair; nay more, that there are distinct indications of non-Adamite races.

The theory of La Peyrère, derived partly from Genesis and partly from the Epistle to the Romans, was, that there had been two separate creations of man; one on the sixth day along with the beasts, at the mere fiat of God, and the other many thousand years afterwards. The first was the creation of the Gentiles. In the first creation, man and woman are created simultaneously, and no names are given them. In the second, Adam is created out of the dust, the breath of God is breathed into his nostrils, and Eve is subsequently created out of his rib. Peyrère saw how many difficulties would thus be obviated, though these were in his time far less numerous and far less formidable than they have become, in consequence of the progress of science.

His system was, however, mainly founded on Rom. v, 12-14, from which he deduced that there were two classes of men. One of these-viz., the Jews, were descended from Adam, who, at his creation, had received a law, the violation of which brought death among his race. The other class-viz., Gentiles, could only commit natural sins, because they had received no law; nevertheless, they too were subjected to the natural consequence of death-so that "death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression."

Peyrère was two centuries before his time; and whether we accept or reject his special theories, it is impossible not to admire his acumen, his candour, and his courage. Like all people who are wiser, fairer, and more keen-sighted than their cotemporaries, he was of course persecuted and rendered as miserable as his theological adversaries, with their three favourite weapons-persecution, imprisonment, and See Latronne, Rev. des Deux Mondes, Paris, 1834, p. 602.

fire-had it in their power to make him. He had dared* to step out of the magic exegetical circle which theology had drawn around all the sciences, and his presumption was punished with prompt violence. Indeed, so severe were the measures of his opponents, that the second part of his book never appeared.

Isaac de la Peyrère* was born at Bordeaux in 1594, of a noble Protestant family, and he distinguished himself for bravery at the celebrated siege of Montauban, where he commanded a company. He then entered the service of the Prince de Condé, which he quitted in 1644, to accompany La Thuillerie, the French ambassador, to Denmark, where he collected the materials for his works on Iceland and Greenland. On his return, he attached himself to the young Prince de Condé, who sent him as his agent to Spain, and whom he afterwards followed in Flanders and Holland. There he got his now famous book-Praadamita-anonymously printed, in 1655. The authorship was, however, known; and his hypothesis, although it solves many difficulties of the Mosaic cosmogony, raised a violent tempest against him. The same year the Bishop of Namur censured the book; it received the honour of being burned by the hangman, by order of the Parliament of Paris; and the Vicar-General of the Archbishop of Malines ordered the author to be arrested. In February 1656, thirty armed men rushed into his room at Brussels, dragged him through the streets, and by consent of the Archduke Leopold, put him in the tower of Turenberg. This was sanctioned by the Prince de Condé, who had a warm regard for Peyrère, but, with his Jesuit confessor, hoped, by a judicious use of terror, to prevail on him "à se convertir." The Prince, on his promise to abjure and retract his book, procured his release, and provided him with money to go to Rome, throw himself at the Pope's feet, and embrace Catholicism. Like Galileo before him, he was forced to go through a form of recantation, and the Pope (Alex. VII) received him graciously. He rejoined Condé in the Low Countries, and became his librarian; but subsequently retired on a small pension to the oratory of Nôtre Dame des Vertus, where he died Jan. 30, 1676.

A friend says of him, that "He was still infatuated with his Præadamites, and it is likely he died with that fantastical notion. He would have been very well pleased if he had known that there is a Rabbi who mentions Adam's preceptor."

Some meagre materials for his biography may be gleaned from Bayle, and from La France Protestante, by M. M. Haag.

+ Continuation of the Menagiana, Dutch ed., p. 38, in Bayle, s. v. Pereira.

The fury of theological hatred raged against him with uncommon vigour, and the year after his book appeared (1656) it was answered in five or six refutations (?), whose flaming character may be judged. of by their titles. One, that of Danhawerus, was called "Præadamita utis, sive fabula primorun hominum ante Adamum conditorum explosa." Another, published by Ursinus at Frankfort, was entitled "Novus Prometheus, Praæadamitarum plastes, ad Caucasum relegatus et religatus." A third, by A. Hulsius, was "Nonens Præadamiticum, sive confutatio vani et socinisantis cujusdam somnii, etc." Lugd. Bat. 1656. He says, "Perturbet te Dominus, quia perturbasti Israelem." Heidanus was even obliged to reply to the charge of having published the book, as a "detestanda calumnia," and an "effrons et immane mendacium, quâvis pœnâ dignissimum." The disgustingly energetic remarks of Petrus ab Andlo on this subject may be found in Bayle.

"Religious subjects," says Payne Knight, "being beyond the reach of sense or reason are always embraced or rejected with violence or heat. Men think they know because they are sure they feel, and are firmly convinced because strongly agitated." The remark applies with full force to the subject before us, where cartloads of abuse were poured in to conceal and fill up the chasms of argument. Even so respectable and learned a writer as Heidegger is not ashamed to furnish fresh extracts to a spicilegium drawn from the disgraceful-I had well-nigh said the infamous-pages of theological controversy. Take this specimen of that well-known style! "Sed meritissimo deridiculo et odio habitus ille nuper cum nocturnis fungis, tristi lunâ natus, Præadamitarum patronus, qui cum animum* induxisset, etc." A few of the usual familiar imputations of fraud, dishonesty, infidelity, etc., follow, in the common fashion of such 'religious' reviewers (who mostly ignore the existence of the ninth commandment); and then, after the dogma has been denounced as 'musteum', 'impium', and 'absurdum', La Peyrère is finally transfixed with the epithet "fanaticus." "E pur si muove!" The name of Peyrère will be reverenced when that of Heidegger is reposing in venerable dust. A type of all these faults in their most concentrated form may be found in the tedious and irritating compilation of Dr. Smyth On the Unity of the Human Races. He says (p. 35), "when infidelity sought to erect its dominion on the ruins of Christianity (!), Voltaire, Rousseau, Peyrère (!), etc., introduced the theory of an original diversity, in order thereby to overthrow the truth and inspiration of the Holy Scriptures." To say nothing of the preposterous chronological mistake, which shews that Dr. Smyth

*Heidegger, Hist. Patriarc., Ex. iv, p. 148.

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