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.

    297/332 (page 285)
    of genius that often show the combination of abihty and insanity (Fig. 96). May it not be that just that lack of control that permits flights of the imagination is related to the flightiness characteristic of those with mental weak- ness or defect ? These studies of inheritance of mental defect inevitably raise the question how to eliminate the mentally defective. This is a matter of great importance because, on the one hand, it is now coming to be recognized that mental defect OtD 66 6 li tlrd 1—1 Oili ^tD tX-xO OrCil-O 0 [i tljO OTbiO &tO Odbd D-o o 6S'^0dd]0db o 0-n fto ti-o o 600 f &t^y/£/€r^, ^/r 6 D Fig. 96.—Pedigree of a family with great inventive and artistic ability, in whose earlier generations appear insanity (I), suicidal tendency, and eccentricity. is at the bottom of most of our social problems. Extreme alcoholism is usually a consequence of a mental make-up in which self-control of the appetite for liquor is lacking. Pauperism is a consequence of mental defects that make the pauper incapable of holding his own in the world's competition. Sex immorality in either sex is commonly due to a certain inability to appreciate consequences, to visualize the inevitableness of cause and effect, combined sometimes with a sex-hyperaesthesia and lack of self-control.