s, and dwells upon the popular belief in
_incubi_ and _succubi_. It is curious to find him placing Leo X.,
Francois I., Henri IV., Louis XIV., among the neuropathics. When it
comes to this, everybody with strong sexual instincts, and the
opportunity of indulging them, is a nervous invalid. Modern times are
illustrated by the debaucheries of the Regency, the reign of Louis XV.,
Russian ladies, the Marquis de Sade. The House of Orleans seems in truth
to have been tainted with hereditary impudicity of a morbid kind. But if
it was so at the end of the last century, it has since the Revolution
remarkably recovered health--by what miracle?

Moreau now formulates the thesis he wishes to prove: "L'aberration
pathologique des sentiments genesiques doit etre assimilee completement
a une nevrose, et, comme telle, son existence est compatible avec les
plus hautes intelligences." He discovers hereditary taint universally
present in these cases. "Heredite directe, heredite indirecte, heredite
transformee, se trouve chez les genesiaques."

Passing to etiology, he rests mainly upon an organism predisposed by
ancestry, and placed in a milieu favourable to its morbid development.
Provocative causes are not sufficient to awake the aberration in healthy
organisms, but the least thing will set a predisposed organism on the
track. This, I may observe, seems to preclude simple imitation, upon
which Moreau afterwards lays considerable stress; for if none but the
already tainted can be influenced by their milieu, none but the tainted
will imitate.

What he calls "General Physical Causes" are (1) Extreme Poverty, (2)
Age, (3) Constitution, (4) Temperament, (5) Seasons of the Year, (6)
Climate, (7) Food.

Extreme poverty leads to indiscriminate vice, incest, sodomy, &c. That
is true, and we know that our city poor and the peasants of some
countries are habitually immoral. Yet Moreau proves too much here. For,
according to his principles, hereditary neurosis ought by this time to
have become chronic, epidemic, endemic, in all the city poor and in all
the peasants of all countries; which is notably not the fact. Puberty
and the approach of senility are pointed out as times when genesiac
symptoms manifest themselves. His observations upon the other points are
commonplace enough; and he repeats the current notion that inhabitants
of hot climates are more lascivious than those of the North.

Among "Individual Physical Causes," Moreau treats of ma