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ous by one-half than illustrious menit will be found to be as follows:

In the first degree, for the father as one to six; for each brother as one to seven; for each son as one to four. In the second degree, for each of the grandfathers, as one to twenty-five; uncle one to forty; nephew one to forty; grandson, one to twenty-nine. In the third degree, for each cousin germain, one to one hundred; each of the other relatives, one to two hundred.

Before we dismiss statistics we must clear up one point. In table 11, the

known, the female line is likewise very much inferior to the male, as is shown in columns two and three of table III.

The author thinks that a more satis

factory solution would be to admit that the aunts, sisters and daughters of illustrious men being accustomed at home to an intellectual and moral atmosphere above the common do not on an average, marry as much as other women, and he is of opinion that his hypothesis would bear the test of facts, though he confesses that it is impossible to apply the test.

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Male line, Female line, Total,

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father stands for mother as well, and brother includes sister as well; in a word the male and female relatives are indicated by one term. We have now to determine the respective positions of the male and females in the eight groups of one hundred families each.

On comparing the two averages, seventy for males, thirty for females, we cannot fail to be struck by the great difference between the two, and the marked preponderance in the male line. Galton has inquired into the cause of this, but without arriving, as he himself admits, at any very satisfactory conclusion. He allows but little weight to the hypothises that in the biographies of great men, that if their mothers are mentioned, but little is said with regard to their other female relations; for in the case of statesmen and great commanders, whose genealogy is well

| 100 100 | 100 100 | 100 | 100

Lastly, 1 may allude to the heredity of the sentiments and passions and I mention a few peculiar instances of the heredity of certain peculiar instincts, strange propensities and dislikes.

Thus families have been known in the members of which the smallest doses of opium produce a convulsive state. Zimmerman speaks of a family on whom coffee had a soporific effect, acting like opium, while opium itself produced no effect. Some families can hardly endure emetics, others purgative medicines, others blood letting. Mantaigne, who took an interest in the question of Heredity, because he derived from his family a tendency to stone, inherited also an invincible repugnance for medicine. "The antipathy" he says, "is hereditary." My father lived seventy-five years, my grandfather sixty-nine, and my great-grandfather

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almost eighty and never tasted nor took any kinds of physic, and for them anything not in common use was a drug. My ancestors by some secret instinct and natural inclination, have ever loathed all manner of physic-the very sight of drugs was an abomination to my father. The Seigneur de Gerirac, my paternal uncle, who was an ecclesiastic, and sickly from birth, and who, notwithstanding, made his weak life hold out till the age of sixty-seven. Falling once into a high protracted fever, the physicians had word sent to him that he must surely die if he would not take some remedy. The good soul, affrighted as he was at this terrible moment, said "Then it is all over with me." But God soon after made their prognostications to prove vain. Possibly I have received from them my natural antipathy to physic."34 I am glad to say that Montaigne's experience does not extend to the majority of the present generation, for if so it would be a bad thing for my profession. We are living in a physicloving generation, witness the enormous sales of patent medicines, and the fortunes amassed by such men as Holloway, Morrison and other venders of patent medicines, so that the next generation, if the hereditary habit be transmitted, will have to swallow an enormous mass of gilded or coated physic.

From the sentiments I am led on to the passions and the hereditary nature

of crime.

police can tell them by their structural peculiarities. Dickens has left us an immortal impersonation in Bill Sykes, and you have only to visit our criminal courts, to become familiar with the the type, to recognize the degradation or degeneration of some of our race.

Our criminal classes are the results of ignorance and passion; they are produced by want, intemperance, foul air, bad diet, intermarriage with another, and other causes.

one

Morel, the great French alienist, has furnished us with some sad illustrations of the heredity of crime, of passion, and

of sin; of forgeries, murders, suicides, committed by men who have had a hereditary taint. Most English writers

on mental disease have observed similar facts.

The criminal class is a morbid devia

tion from the normal type of humanity.
It is a production of civilization, though
a degeneration, though we may take
some consolation in the thought that as
man is capable of improvement, of de-
velopment, so there are morals hygienic
measures which can remedy the imper-
fections which have arisen from the
neglect of the lessons of nature; from
the departure from the laws of morality,
so that I hold that our criminal classes
are capable of improvement, of amelior-
ation. I look upon it as one of the best
signs of our times, that we have armies
of workers, who are engaged in the
work of social regeneration, in the
spread of knowledge, in the improve-
ment of the dwellings, and social sur-

This is one of the saddest passages in the history of humanity, the heritage of crime, and yet it is one of the best sub-roundings of these classes, from whose stantiated. We have a distinct criminal ranks the criminal classes have been class, physically and psychically our largely recruited.

34. Montaigne Essays, ii, p. 37.

(To be Continued.)

ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS. their patients, and the public. The phy

THE EXTENT AND DISTRIBU-
TION OF CONSUMPTION IN
NEW HAMPSHIRE.

Read before the New Hampshire Medical Society,
at the Annual Meeting, June, 1888.
BY IRVING A. WATSON, M. D.
Secretary State Board of Health and Registrar of
Vital Statistics, Concord, N. H.

I

BEG the indulgence of this society for a brief time in order to present some facts which have been deducted from the registration of deaths in New Hampshire for the past three years, in relation to pulmonary consumption. But almost before I begin, let me digress for a moment to say that the registration of vital statistics in this state has become sufficiently accurate to be already of great value in considering certain questions affecting the welfare and happiness of our citizens. It only needs the analytical mind and the careful hand to bring forth an array of facts relating to the prevalence of disease among us, that will not only enlighten the public mind, but also prove intellectual food for ourselves. It is forty years since this society made its first strong effort to secure a registration of

deaths such as we have reached within

the past three years; and it is only a small fraction of the recorded facts of those three years that I shall bring before you at this time. When another forty years shall have been added to the countless decades of the past, if our system of registration is maintained the members of the profession in New Hampshire will be in possession of certain mortuary laws which are to-day unknown, or, at most, largely conjectural, and will have a topographical knowledge of the diseases that invade or are indigenous to the state that will be of incalculable value to physicians,

sician who would save himself the trouble of making a return of deaths by evading or ignoring the law, would neglect any other duty tending to make our practice more scientific and Our knowledge of disease more exact; and I am glad to be able to say, as registrar of vital statistics for the state, that so far as I know there is no opposition to such a requirement on the part of the profession. Se much for the digression.

Pulmonary consumption is by far the most fatal disease with which mankind is afflicted. In the aggregate, the devastating plagues of the sixteenth century, and the frightful epidemics of cholera which have since occured, are tame in their ghostly havoc compared with the terrific onslaughter of consumption. No race or clime is exempt from its terrible blight; even among the salubrious granite hills and the healthful valleys of New Hampshire it stalks, year in and year out, destroying nearly twice as many lives as any other disease. With an insidious tread, whose faintest footfall is first heard in the occasional bronchial cough, and whose form is first seen in the hectic flush that sometimes counterfeits the bloom of health, it grasps its victims, and, with a hand so gloved as to be almost unfelt, crushes out life after life in its silent conquest.

It has no pity for age, sex, education, or wealth; it pursues the mendicant; it is domiciled with the rich. Its terrible reality is so interwoven with civilization that we regard it a concomitant of every community, scarcely inuuiring by what decree it becomes a part of our heritage. Public opinion has already too long ascribed the inheritance to the caprices of a much-abused Providence, or to some other mysterious edict, from

which there is no escape. It is time that such views be consigned to the great dump-heap where the carts of superstition are-thank God!-unloading the intellectual garbage of generations, and the true relation of cause to effect be studiously and scientifically examined. To do this, we must get at all the facts that have in any way a casual relation to the disease. First, the extent of its prevaleuce must be known; the age, sex, and condition of its decendents; the season, topography, and other factors that can only be obtained by a careful and systematic registration.

With a view of presenting some of these essential facts for your consideration, I have prepared a few diagrams and tables which I trust will not weary you to follow.

1,347 from old age, 918 from cholera infantum, 637 from cancer, 464 from typhoid fever, and 411 from diphtheria. It will be seen that diphtheria and typhoid fever appear almost insignificant upon the diagram compared with the great mortality from consumption, although the former will cause far greater anxiety and excitement in any community. Gver fifteen per cent. of all the deaths that occur in New England are from consumption. Diagram No. 2 shows the percentages of deaths from consumption, by specified ages, to the total mortality from consumption, for the years 1885, 1886, 1887. This diagram represents the disease as it actually exists. The percentage of decendents is as follows: Under one, 2.44; one to five, 2.07; five to ten, 0.78;

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9.74; twenty to thirty, 26.78; thirty to forty, 18.98; forty to fifty, 12.60; fifty to sixty, 9.08; sixty to seventy, 8.33; seventy to eighty, 5.22; over eighty,

Diagram No. 1 shows the proportional | ten to fifteen, 1.53; fifteen to twenty, relation of consumption to eight of the most fatal diseases in the state, arranged in their numerical order of fatality. It should be remembered that these diagrams cover a period of three years, 1885, 1886, 1887. There were 2,432 deaths from consumption, 1,536 from heart disease, 1,526 from pneumonia, 1 421 from apoplexy and paralysis,

2.40.

This table, taken by itself without reference to the living of the respective ages given, is exceedingly misleading, inasmuch as, without considering the

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DIA'M &

between those ages, but there is a much larger living dopulation between those same ages. My observation has long led me to doubt that there was any period of life that could be classed as "consumptive," in contradistinction to any other period offering exemption from the disease, after adult life has

DIAM 3

before mentioned, by specified ages, to the total population of those ages. The percentages are as follows:

Under one, .32; one to five, .06; five to ten, .02; ten to fifteen, .04; fifteen to twenty, .24; twenty to thirty, .34; thirty to forty, .32; forty to fifty, .25; fifty to sixty, .22; sixty to seventy, .38; seventy to eighty, .29; over eighty, .41.

Standing in another way, the ratio of deaths from consumption to the living

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