On the foetus in utero : as inoculating the maternal with the peculiarities of the paternal organism in a series of essays now first collected / by Alexander Harvey.

  • Harvey, Alexander, 1811-1889.
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the foetus in utero : as inoculating the maternal with the peculiarities of the paternal organism in a series of essays now first collected / by Alexander Harvey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tlie black population tends rather to diminisli tlian increase, and that it can only be adequately main- tained by continual importations from Africa. Whether that diminution is in any degree owing to the operation of Strzelecki's law, it is jDcrhaps at present impossible to say. I would only remark further, that in arguing here from Strzelecki's inference, it is only pro- visionally, and on the supposition of its being a fact; and if a fact, then, of course, a law of nature ; and that in this, as in every other part of this Essay, my object is to suggest and direct inquiry, not to dogmatize. A correspondent, indeed, laughs at me for having elsewhere given heed to that in- ference. On the other hand, a writer in the Edinburgh Review (No. CLXXXIV., p. 456, foot note), referring to one of my papers in the Edinburgh Monthly Journal of Medical Science, suggests that Strzelecki should excuse me for treating it as nothing more than an hypothesis for the present! Considering, however, on the one hand, the astounding nature of the inference, and, on the other, the high character of Strzelecki as a philosophic observer, as well as the extent of his observations (some hundreds of instances of the phenomenon without a single exception), I humbly submit that, until the inference shall be either fully established or shown to be fallacious, the proper course in regard to it is, to kce]! the mean between the two extremes of too much stillness in refusing, and of too much easiness in admitting it,—or (in