Heredity and eugenics ; a course of lectures summarizing recent advances in knowledge in variation, heredity, and evolution and its relation to plant, animal and human improvement and welfare / by William Ernest Castle, John Merle Coulter, Charles Benedict Davenport, Edward Murray East, William Lawrence Tower.

Date:
[1912]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Heredity and eugenics ; a course of lectures summarizing recent advances in knowledge in variation, heredity, and evolution and its relation to plant, animal and human improvement and welfare / by William Ernest Castle, John Merle Coulter, Charles Benedict Davenport, Edward Murray East, William Lawrence Tower. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

    296/332 (page 284)
    of the children are Hable to go insane; and that nervous breakdowns of these types never occur if both parents be of sound stock. Even the condition of general nervousness is an indica- tion of a nervous weakness that is, apparently, due to the absence of a determiner. Thus when a person belonging to a neurotic strain marries a normal person whose father died of apoplexy, some neurotic and feeble-minded children may appear in the offspring. Finally, a study of families with special abilities reveals a method of inheritance quite like that of nervous defect. (?) [t] (t) (N) [n] (N) [n]{(n) [N](1)(i)[^(N)(i)ll][N] (t)[N] (I)(E) Fig. 95.—-Pedigree of a family in which the father's parents (upper left) are both nervous (N) and have four nervous children. The mother is nervous; so were her father and four of her brothers and sisters, while one is insane. Of the three grandchildren one is insane (I), one epileptic (E), and one extremely nervous (N).— Cannon and Rosanopf. If both parents be color artists, or have a high grade of vocal ability or are litterateurs of high grade, then all of their children tend to be of high grade also. If one parent has high ability, while the other has low ability but has ancestry with high ability, part of the children will have high ability and part low. It seems like an extraordinary conclusion that high ability is inherited as though due to the absence of a determiner in the same way as feeble- mindedness and insanity are inherited. We are reminded of the poet: Great wits to madness sure are near allied. Evidence for the relationship is given by pedigrees of men