hereditary transmission, while the associations are
developed in very early life, and are too regular to be the simple result
of suggestion.[238]

All such organic variations are abnormalities. It is important that we
should have a clear idea as to what an abnormality is. Many people imagine
that what is abnormal is necessarily diseased. That is not the case,
unless we give the word disease an inconveniently and illegitimately wide
extension. It is both inconvenient and inexact to speak of
color-blindness, criminality, and genius as diseases in the same sense as
we speak of scarlet fever or tuberculosis or general paralysis as
diseases. Every congenital abnormality is doubtless due to a peculiarity
in the sperm or oval elements or in their mingling, or to some disturbance
in their early development. But the same may doubtless be said of the
normal dissimilarities between brothers and sisters. It is quite true that
any of these aberrations may be due to antenatal disease, but to call them
abnormal does not beg that question. If it is thought that any authority
is needed to support this view, we can scarcely find a weightier than that
of Virchow, who repeatedly insisted on the right use of the word
"anomaly," and who taught that, though an anomaly may constitute a
predisposition to disease, the study of anomalies--pathology, as he called
it, teratology as we may perhaps prefer to call it--is not the study of
disease, which he termed nosology; the study of the abnormal is perfectly
distinct from the study of the morbid. Virchow considers that the region
of the abnormal is the region of pathology, and that the study of disease
must be regarded distinctly as nosology. Whether we adopt this
terminology, or whether we consider the study of the abnormal as part of
teratology, is a secondary matter, not affecting the right understanding
of the term "anomaly" and its due differentiation from the term "disease."

At the Innsbruck meeting of the German Anthropological Society,
in 1894, Virchow thus expressed himself: "In old days an anomaly
was called pathos, and in this sense every departure from the
norm is for me a pathological event. If we have ascertained such
a pathological event, we are further led to investigate what
_pathos_ was the special cause of it.... This cause may be, for
example, an external force, or a chemical substance, or a
physical agent, producing in the normal condition of th