d upon in
these circles as a child of much promise. Honest and virtuous children
are considered in this society as imbeciles, or even as traitors and
spies, and are consequently despised, hated and ill-treated. The
deleterious influences we have mentioned do not act alone, but are
often associated with other factors in causing degeneration of the
sexual life. When other influences preponderate, we may sometimes
observe depravity in the country, and on the contrary, healthy and
normal conditions in certain towns. We must always avoid exaggerating
the importance of a single factor in making generalizations. Certain
country villages, the inhabitants of which have become alcoholized and
degraded, may present a much more unhealthy sexual life than certain
sober and well-governed towns.

=Vagabondage.=--In the _Archiv fuer Rassen und Gesellschafts biologie_
of 1905 (Archives of the biology of races and of society), Doctor
Joerger relates the history of the descendants of a couple of
vagabonds, which he carefully studied for several generations. Nearly
all the members of this family became vagabonds, thieves, prostitutes,
and other society pests. Vain attempts were made to give a good
education to some of them, but they ran away from school to lead the
lives of vagabonds or criminals. In a few of them only, education gave
some results, but not at all brilliant. In this family, alcoholism and
its blastophthoria played a considerable part.

We can hardly admit that the mnemic phenomena explained in Chapter I
could have acted appreciably in two or three hundred years, a period
much too short for the human species. No doubt the common ancestor of
the above family of vagabonds descended from a family of vagabonds. I
do not, however, think I am wrong in attributing to blastophthoria,
superposed on the disastrous combinations of germs which is inevitable
in the life of vagabonds, the principal cause of this typical
degeneration of the family, a degeneration in which sexual degradation
strongly predominates. I recommend Doctor Joerger's work to any one
interested in this question. It would be useful to draw up
genealogical tables, with the medical and psychological descriptions
of the whole population of a small town.

=Americanism.=--By this term I designate an unhealthy feature of
sexual life, common among the educated classes of the United States,
and apparently originating in the greed for dollars, which is more
prevalent in N