The four notes in the review of our colleague's work, "Sur le croisement des familles," will be answered at some later time: they do not in the slightest concern the objections which I have had the honour to present to him, and which I resume now as follows:

1. In the first edition of M. Boudin's essay, the total number of inmates in the Deaf and Dumb Institution of Paris was not declared. It was incorrectly given in our own Mémoires.

2. In the same edition we read that "the resemblance of the proportional numbers found by MM. Landes, Chazarain, and Boudin, constitute a very powerful argument in favour of the precision of their observations", which tended to admit the influence of consanguinity in marriage upon the production of deafness and dumbness. In fact, M. Boudin had deduced from a few observations made in the departments of the Rhône and the Gironde, that in every 100 deaf and dumb cases, he discovered that at Bordeaux 30 per cent., at Lyons 25 per cent., and at Paris 28 per cent., were of consanguineous origin. This uniformity would, indeed, be significant if the number of the deaf and dumb was at all equal in the above named departments. But this number is very different, as it happens; there is in the Seine 1 deaf and dumb case to 4,694 inhabitants; in the Rhône, 1 in 1,669; in the Gironde, 1 in 1638. Now if marriages between cousins have some influence upon the number of the deaf and dumb, the marriages ought to be more frequent in the Rhône than the Seine, and reciprocally, the number of the deaf and dumb ought to be raised wherever there are many consanguineous marriages. In other terms, if there are three times more deaf-and-dumb cases in the Rhône than in the Seine, the proportion of the deaf-and-dumb of consanguineous origin to the deaf-and-dumb of every origin ought to be three times more considerable at Lyons than at Paris. Very well; if at Paris M. Boudin has found 28 per cent., he ought to find in the Rhône about 84 per cent. It would have been easy to answer to this reasoning by facts which would have confirmed or nullified it, and to establish that there are in the department of the Rhône two-and-a-half times more consanguineous marriages than there are in that of the Seine. They preferred, however, to renounce the argument drawn from the resemblance of statistics.

3. I had proposed a plan which consisted in making inquiries by departments, and in comparing reports far more complete than those of which M. Boudin has made use. Neither M. Devay, nor M. Boudin, nor their pupils, have once mentioned this.

4. I had foreseen that the number of marriages officially declared

and registered between first cousins was below the truth, and we shall see that this argument was correct, since (in certain communes at least) no mention is made of the degree of cousin in the registers, and in many others no statistical information has been furnished on this point. It followed that the declared percentage of consanguineous marriages-2 per cent. was too small, and that the true number was not known even to those best informed on the subject. Nevertheless, M. Boudin maintains that his statistics are correct.

5. I had stated that to bring forward the danger of procreating deaf-and-dumb children by marriages between nephews and aunts— overstepped by 70 per cent. the most extensive limits of inference, the proof lying merely in one case of deaf-dumbness from this origin in the Institution at Paris. There was no answer to this. It is by an analogous inference that they pretend to find only one half-bred Jew deaf and dumb. It is evidently impossible to form any conclusions from such statistics.

6. Now, some apocryphal documents having been produced in the course of discussion (statistics from Ohio and Massachusetts), I have felt it my duty to bring forward this fact, and thus I have prevented future compilers from making many serious errors. They have not given me credit for it. Perhaps they will this time tell me whence comes the document attributed to Don Ramon de la Sagra, and whence come the statistics of Mr. Morris, who has studied the cases of 4,013 children of consanguineous origin? Who is Mr. Morris? and where has he published the experiences of these extraordinary inquiries, which must have cost him so many long years of study? This document must be looked upon with a great deal of suspicion when we find that one of those authors who copies M. Boudin literally-even in his mistakes-has abstained from copying it.

I am, therefore, authorised to reiterate my previous criticisms; and, upon some points, I expect further to unfold them. Allow me, before I do so, to bring the subject before your notice in what I believe to be a true light, and to eliminate from the discussion certain foreign elements; allow me, in other terms, to bring forward the question itself.

II. THE LIMITS OF THE SUBJECT.

The considerations which follow, I believe, must be disregarded with reference to animals and vegetables. For, besides the convenience of allowing certain men to examine into special questions, the observations made on animals do not appear exactly applicable

to mankind, at least so far as regards "pairing"; for the conditions of existence are completely different, and the aim which is proposed in zoology has no analogy in social life. It is, therefore, difficult to avoid the unlucky confusion which is continually being made between "selection" and consanguinity, which is only one of the results of selection; this result, applied to realise a known end, cannot be assimilated by factitious consequences with the spontaneous results of a consanguineous union among mankind. It may happen, in fact, that when consanguinity is applied to animals for the purpose of selection, it produces an artificial development of some parts of the animal, and may thus injure the general development. But this result is not avoided when we practise selection, beyond all consanguinity. It is not, therefore, logical to attribute to consanguinity that which is, or may be, attributable to selection.

Also, if breeding in-and-in (sic), that is to say, consanguinity increased a hundred-fold, had not, perhaps, given in its interior action the magnificent results which have been proved by the zoologists (and which our colleague, M. Sanson, has clearly shown, with his usual talent), we have no right to extend to mankind, by pure induction, the laws obtained from observation of the domestic animals. Equally, if it were established that the consanguinity of human unions, so far from showing the dangers which our opponents give it, is in the end advantageous, what shall we say about a theory which, without experimental data, without taking account of the respective differences of man in his social state and animals (that is to say, the liberty necessary for human development, and the subjugation not less necessary for the development of animals for the use of man), would proclaim at once the necessity of consanguineous unions?

For this reason, I deprive myself without regret of the support which those zoologists could offer me, who have, in my opinion, outrun anthropologists, and marked, not without precision, the degree in which the consanguinity of reproducers is useful to selection. As to the vegetable kingdom, I do not think it will be proper to bring before your notice the curious connection of relationship which some have tried to prove-with more boldness than good sense-between the fecundity of plants and animals, with reference to consanguinity. If, besides, this same theory could bear the slightest examination, our opponents would not be able to find in it any arguments favourable to their thesis; but of what use is it to extend, so far as the subject of such a strange assimilation, a question which it is above all things necessary to narrow, confine, and specialise?

Do they believe that the definitions may be, as regards mankind, so clear, and that the problem is so well stated, that facts alone may henceforth solve it? That would be a fatal error. The method and its interpretation play here a part of the first order. They speak of consanguineous marriages; they reprove them, and wish them to be forbidden. The question being proposed in these general terms, who can hesitate a single moment in giving his support to the reproof and the interdict? For does not the term "consanguineous marriage" comprehend incestuous unions of all degrees? And how is it that, in order to perpetuate the confusion, our adversaries do not fill up their writings by the documents-more or less authentic-in which are shewn, on the strength of the interdiction of marriages of distant kindred, the moral and physiological evils of incestuous marriages in barbarous or savage countries?

It is painful to bring this remark before your notice, it seems so very puerile; and yet it is necessary to re-establish the thread of the discussion in which we are now engaged. It refers solely to the dangers attributed to marriages between cousins; beyond that, it does not even refer to the moral inconveniences of such unions. Whatever opinion there may be on this point, it will not figure in our debate; nevertheless, not because morality ought to be separate from physiology, but because it is necessary to simplify a question which is already only too complicated of itself. If moralists can see the chief inconveniences of unions between cousins-and such were the first fathers of the Church-by all means let such alliances be forbidden; but let it be done then for moral or theological motives, and not for reasons borrowed from a false biology. Such is, however, the origin of this discussion. The civil law has given such force to canonical prescription fallen into disuse, that dispensations are never refused. One would wish, however, to restore these prescriptions, by relying not only on the wise and legitimate reasons of their authors (since these reasons, as we shall see later, no longer exist), but by relying on statistics and physiology. Another consideration, entirely theoretical, must be brought forward. I will suppose, then, that marriages between cousins furnish really a larger proportion of weakly and sickly children than other marriages; this fact, well established, may receive a certain number of rational explanations; but, doing away with this idea that every man is affected with a morbid predisposition, more or less developed, and that these predispositions have a tendency to perpetuate themselves in all the branches of a family, one may fear that two first cousins, affected with the same predisposition,

should transmit it to their children in a stronger manner than it appeared in themselves; each of these two individuals being slightly gouty, for instance, would produce a child who from his youth would show symptoms or injuries which would prove the existence of an uric diathesis of the worst description. Now I know not if such is, in reality, the law of morbid transmissions; it must be controlled by facts, and this part of the work has not yet been done. But, in all cases, the affirmative hypothesis has nothing in it which offends reason; on the contrary: and I know there are many hygienists who are hostile to consanguineous marriages on account of this very plausible theory.

Such is not the position of our opponents. They maintain that consanguinity, ipso facto, pure consanguinity, has of itself, in the absence of all disease in the parents, the property of producing diseases in the children. It is only this theory which I am now attacking, without caring to know if the facts which I am examining confirm or weaken the question of the dangers of a doubly unhealthy consanguinity.

Upon this last point, nevertheless, I am not prepared to think that the chances of disease in children are more numerous when the two parents are afflicted with the same disease, than when they show, each one separately, special predispositions; for, if we suppose that the laws of morbid inheritance are invariable, it would follow in the first case that the child would be affected with a predisposition in some degree pure; in the second with a predisposition, so to speak, hybrid; and, all things being equal, I believe that clear and well characterised diseases are less rebellious to therapeutics than those in which all sorts of pathological elements are mingled. This would require to be scientifically established or refuted; but the dangers of consanguineous marriages, at all events in the way in which they are understood by Messrs. Devay and Boudin, have nothing common to inheritance. M. Boudin insists strongly on this point. "In our opinion," he says, "consanguineous marriages, so far from militating in favour of an entirely imaginary and morbid inheritance, constitute the most powerful argument against the laws themselves of inheritance. Why, you see parents who are consanguineous, full of strength and health, exempt from all appreciable disease, incapable of giving to their children the health which they themselves have-giving them, on the contrary, that which they do not themselves possess; and it is in presence of such facts, that some persons dare to bring forward the words 'morbid inheritance'!" Assuredly, the audacity must be great