is not far distant when such
marriages will be a crime punishable by law. {264}

2. TENDENCY IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION.--That there is a tendency in the right
direction must be admitted, and is perhaps most clearly shown in some of
the articles on prison reform. Many of them strongly urge the necessity of
preventive work as the truest economy, and some go so far as to say that if
the present human knowledge of the laws of heredity were acted upon for a
generation, reformatory measures would be rendered unnecessary.

3. SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES.--The mother who has ruined her health by late
hours, highly-spiced food, and general carelessness in regard to hygienic
laws, and the father who is the slave of questionable habits, will be very
sure to have children either mentally or morally inferior to what they
might otherwise have had a right to expect. But the prenatal influences may
be such that evils arising from such may be modified to a great degree.

4. FORMATION OF CHARACTER.--I believe that pre-natal influences may do as
much in the formation of character as all the education that can come
after, and that the mother may, in a measure, "will" what that influence
shall be, and that, as knowledge on the subject increases, it will be more
and more under their control. In that, as in everything else, things that
would be possible with one mother would not be with another, and measures
that would be successful with one would produce opposite results from the
other.

5. INHERITING DISEASE. Consumption--that dread foe of modern life--is the
most frequently encountered of all affections as the result of inherited
predispositions. Indeed, some of the most eminent physicians have believed
it is never produced in any other way. Heart disease, disease of the
throat, excessive obesity, affections of the skin, asthma, disorders of the
brain and nervous system, gout, rheumatism and cancer, are all hereditary.
A tendency to bleed frequently, profusely and uncontrollably, from trifling
wounds, is often met with as a family affection.

6. MENTAL DERANGEMENTS.--Almost all forms of mental derangements are
hereditary--one of the parents or near relation being afflicted. Physical
or bodily weakness is often hereditary, such as scrofula, gout, rheumatism,
rickets, consumption, apoplexy, hernia, urinary calculi, hemorrhoids or
piles, cataract, etc. In fact, all physical weakness, if ingrafted in
either parent, is transmitted from parents to off