THE

Journal of Health and Disease.

MAY, 1846.

PHYSIOLOGY IN REGARD TO THE LAWS OF INCREASE AND THE INFLUENCE OF PARENTS ON OFFSPRING.

CHAPTER IV.

Canonical Law

SECTION 2.-Injurious influence of intermarriage on Man. regarding Marriage in England.-Marriage of first cousins injurious.--Favours the development of scrofula.-Of Mental Imbecility, of Cretinism.-The destruction of the titled families of Europe.-Louis Philippe.-The Jews.

Ir is not to be supposed that man forms any exception to the operation of this law.

In fact, the power of this law in relation to man is almost universally recognized in civilized countries.

Nearness of relationship constitutes a moral barrier in the minds of many against marriage; and in many countries, the public opinion has obtained for itself expression in the passing of laws, by which marriage between near relations is prevented. Thus in England, the public opinion has gained expression in the following tabular views.

A Man may not marry his

Grandmother.

Grandfather's Wife.

Wife's Grandmother.

Father's Sister.

Mother's Sister.

Father's Brother's Wife,

Mother's Brother's Wife.
Wife's Father's Sister.
Wife's Mother's Sister.
Mother.

Step-Mother.

Wife's Mother.

Daughter.

Wife's Daughter.

Son's Wife.

A Woman may not marry her
Grandfather.

Grandmother's Husband.
Husband's Grandfather.
Father's Brother.

Mother's Brother.

Father's Sister's Husband.
Mother's Sister's Husband.
Husband's Father's Brother.
Husband's Mother's Brother.
Father.

Step-Father.

Husband's Father.

Son.

Husband's Son.

Daughter's Husband.

T t

These tabular views exhibit some curious anomalies. Thus a man may not marry his wife's sister, although she has no blood relationship, when yet he may marry his first cousin, a being near to him in blood; or to exhibit still more clearly the anomaly, a man may not marry the child of his brother or sister, but a child of a brother or sister may marry the child of another brother or sister.

Intermarriages of first cousins, which violate the law of the Creator, are, it thus appears, permitted by the law of England.

Such intermarriages are attended with punishment. It should be ever borne in mind, that the probabilities are in a very considerable ratio, that the progeny will be weak-minded, idiotic, or at least scrofulous.

The effect of such intermarriages on the general constitution may be noticed first. It will prepare the mind for giving credence to the facts in relation to the injurious influence exerted by intermarriages upon the mental constitution. These effects upon the general constitution are unfolded with striking clearness in the following philosophic remarks by Lugol, on Endemic Scrofula :

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"At one time the royal roads were the only means of communication between the different parts of France, and these roads were not universal, and were often much out of repair. The

roads of a secondary order, and the bye-roads were also few and incomplete, so that the intercourse between villages and even towns of some note could only take place by narrow paths, which could not for the most part be traversed excepting on foot.

"It may be readily conceived that in such a state of things removals from one town to another must have been difficult, and consequently that they would rarely take place. It is not long since that travelling was almost unknown in France; a man who had once been from Orleans to Paris became remarkable for the remainder of his life; and a villager had frequently no knowledge of places a league or two removed from his own hut. In addition to this, neighbouring villages frequently entertained feelings of the most jealous rivalry, which commonly led to fierce and sanguinary contentions. These causes combined operated in confining the lives and the intercourse of each village within its own narrow limits.

"From want, therefore, of external relations, the inhabitants intermarried among each other; they even made it a point of honour to seek a wife in their own village; and the youth who went elsewhere for a partner was looked upon almost as a culprit. A girl quitting her native soil to establish herself in any other village, implied that she had failed in gaining a husband in her own, and that she put up with a stranger for want of a better.

The consequence of such customs was, that the people married among themselves, and often among relations, so that at length some villages formed but one large family. The effect of such unions being to produce a gradual deterioration of blood, the population, therefore, after a few generations, passed into the SCROFULOUS CONDITION almost as a matter of course, and this condition, when once established, was directly propagated by inheritance. It is indubitable that such is the origin of many of those cases of the general diffusion of scrofula among a population, the starting point of which cannot be determined in the present day, and for which no cause is to be discovered in the circumstances attached to the locality.

"Even in the nineteenth century there are many places the

customs of which, relative to marriage, favour the development of scrofula; and in which men neglect, in their own cases, what they are careful to provide in the breeding of their cattle and the cultivation of their crops-namely, the crossing of the breed. "The inhabitants of many villages in France and other countries, the race of mountaineers, and many other classes of society, all furnish numerous and incontestible facts in proof of the opinion, that the race deteriorates from a deficiency in the crossing of blood. Alexander Bodin has remarked, in his Statistics of the Department of the North, that the inhabitants of Lisle beget scrofulous children when they intermarry among THEMSELVES; but that it is not so when they ally themselves to STRANGERS. At Orleans, also, marriages among relations are exceedingly common; and we can find no other reason than this for the general diffusion of scrofulous diseases among the inhabitants of that great city.

"The fearful prevalence of scrofula among mountaineers is a matter of general observation; and in these people also there is no other mode of accounting for the disease than in their frequent intermarriages, and the rarity of their mingling their blood with that of the plain. Neither the pure and bracing air, nor the salubrity of the soil, nor their sufficiency of nourishment, avails in preventing the spread of the scrofulous taint among the inhabitants of Auvergne, of Cevennes, of the Alps, and of the Pyrenees.

"In Jersey the noble families seldom marry excepting among themselves, and the consequence is, that in that island the native aristocracy are well nigh extinguished by scrofulous diseases. The same thing happens in Spain, where mesalliances in noble families are still more rare than in any other country; but the Spanish noble is a diminutive rickety being; stammering is a frequent complaint in their families; and their children die in great numbers. We were formerly acquainted with a Spanish nobleman who was deformed; he had been the father of five children, four of whom had been destroyed by scrofulous diseases; the fifth and only survivor was rickety and was shapen like himself."

The evil effects of too close an intermarriage have not been

confined to the nobility of Spain; the higher classes in every country have suffered to a greater or less degree. Indeed by far the greater number of the illustrations of the frequency and the mortality of scrofulous diseases contained in Lugol's work on scrofula, he states have been drawn from among titled families. Lugol, in referring to this and to other causes of scrofula, adds in another part of his work :

"The aristocracy is degenerated in the first instance by too exclusive alliances in their own grade, and in the next place, because when weakened by too long a course of such alliances, they have at length become scrofulous. Scrofula, when once generated, becomes hereditary as a matter of course, and increases in intensity in each successive link in the line of posterity.

"It is impossible, therefore, to insist with too much earnestness upon the necessity of crossing the blood, in order to stay the progress of endemic scrofula; for it is only by successive crossings that we shall be able to eradicate the taint from, and to fortify the constitution of populations which have long been its victims."

In connexion with the evil of intermarriage between near re. latives, as exhibited by the oligarchical class, Lugol records his opinion that that is one main cause of scrofula. "It is to the assemblage of these causes, coupled with the fact that their influences are often concentrated within a narrow sphere, that we may refer the remark that the noble families and the privileged classes of all countries, but especially of Spain, Italy, Russia, and England, are desolated and eventually extinguished by the progress of hereditary scrofula."

If, then, so dreadful a diseased state, affecting the general constitution as a whole, is producible by such intermarriages, how certain it is that individual diseased states are produced by the same conditions!

If such are the effects produced upon the general system, how much more deleterious, it is likely, will be the effects on the cerebral system, and, through it, on the mind itself.

Mental imbecility is a result of the intermarriage of near relations.