CHAPTER I. Introduction

INTRODUCTION

Considered as a condition hurtful to the type, the conception of degeneracy may be said to appear even in the precursors of man, since animals destroy soon after birth offspring which, to them, appear peculiar. With that stage of development of the religious sense marked by assigning malign occult powers to natural objects and forces, this view of degeneracy became systematised, and exposed weakly or deformed offspring, charged to evil powers, to death. This occult conception of degeneracy is even yet a part of American folklore. Against degenerate children charms are still used by the "witch-doctors" among the "Pennsylvania Dutch." These people are on the level of culture of the early seventeenth century middle class English, if not a little below it. The folklore of these, as embodied in Shakespeare, demonstrates, according to J. G. Kiernan, that ere the seventeenth century the fact that "mental and moral defect expressed itself in physical stigmata was recognised and even the term used." Thistleton Dyer remarks that it is an old prejudice, not yet extinct, that those who are defective or deformed are marked by nature as prone to mischief. Thus in King Richard III. (i. 3) Margaret calls Richard--

"Thou elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog! Thou that wast sealed in thy nativity The slave of nature and the son of hell!"

She calls him hog in allusion to his cognisance, which was a boar. A popular expression in Shakespeare's day for a deformed person was "stigmatic." It denoted any one who had been stigmatised or burnt with iron (an ignominious punishment), and hence was employed to represent a person on whom nature had set a mark of deformity. Thus in the Third Part of Henry VI. (ii. 2) Queen Margaret says--

"But thou art neither like thy sire nor dam; But like a foul misshapen stigmatic, Marked by the destinies to be avoided, As venom toads, or lizards' dreadful stings."

Again in the Second Part of Henry VI. (v. 1) young Clifford says to Richard--

"Foul stigmatic, that's more than thou canst tell."

In A Midsummer Night's Dream (v. 1) Oberon wards off degeneracy from the issue of the happy lovers by the following charm--

"And the blots of Nature's hand Shall not in their issue stand; Never mole, hare-lip nor scar, Nor mark prodigious, such as are Despised in nativity, Shall upon their children be."

Constant allusions to this subject occur in old writers, showing how strong was the belief of the early English on this point. King John (iv. 2) calls Hubert, the supposed murderer of Prince Arthur,--

"A fellow by the hand of Nature marked, Quoted and signed to do a deed of shame."

Concerning this adaptation of the mind to the deformity of the body Francis Bacon remarks: "Deformed persons are commonly even with Nature, for as Nature hath done ill by them so do they by Nature, being void of natural affection, and so they have their revenge on Nature."

The quaint old "Anatomist of Melancholy," Burton, seems but to paraphrase modern curers of degeneracy when, at the end of his chapter on the inheritance of defects, he remarks concerning this fetichistic notion: "So many several ways are we plagued and published for our father's defaults; in so much that as Fernelius truly saith: 'It is the greatest part of our felicity to be well born, and it were happy for human kind, if only such parents as are sound of body and mind should be suffered to marry.' An husbandman will sow none but the best and choicest seed upon his land, he will not rear a bull or an horse, except he be right shapen in all parts, or permit him to cover a mare, except he be well assured of his breed; we make choice of the best rams for our sheep, rear the neatest kine, and keep the best dogs, quanto id diligentius in procreandis liberis observandum! And how careful, then, should we be in begetting of our children! In former times some countries have been so chary in this behalf, so stern, that if a child were crooked or deformed in body or mind, they made him away; so did the Indians of old by the relation of Curtius, and many other well-governed commonwealths according to the discipline of those times. 'Heretofore in Scotland,' saith Hect Boethius, 'if any were visited with the falling sickness, madness, gout, leprosy, or any such dangerous disease which was likely to be propagated from the father to the son, he was instantly gelded; a woman kept from all company of men; and if by chance having some such disease she were found to be with child, she with her brood were buried alive'; and this was done for the common good, lest the whole nation should be injured or corrupted. A severe doom, you will say, and not to be used amongst Christians, yet more to be looked into than it is. For now by our too much facility in this kind, in giving way for all to marry that will, too much liberty and indulgence in tolerating all sorts, there is a vast confusion of hereditary diseases, no family secure, no man almost free, from some grievous infirmity or other, when no choice is had, but still the eldest must marry, as so many stallions of the race; or if rich, be they fools or dizzards, lame or maimed, unable, intemperate, dissolute, exhaust through riot, as he said, they must be wise and able by inheritance. It comes to pass that our generation is corrupt, we have many weak persons both in body and mind, many feral diseases raging among us, crazed families; our fathers bad, and we are like to be worse."

This conception gradually developed into the widespread myth of a primevally perfect man through the natural operation of that psychological law whereby, as Macaulay remarks, society, constantly moving forward with eager speed, is as constantly looking backward with tender regret. They turn their eyes and see a lake where an hour before they were toiling through sand.

From this view came the belief that man as existing is degenerate. This degeneracy, while popularly charged to occult influences, was early ascribed by scientists to physical causes. Aristotle, as Osborn points out, appears to have recognised degeneration or the gradual decline of structures in form and usefulness, in his analysis of "movement" in connection with development. Degeneration is first met with as a term in an explanation of the origin of species by Buffon in the eighteenth century. The conception itself occurs in a criticism by Sylvius of Vesalius (1514-64), who had asserted that the anatomy of Galen could not have been founded upon the human body, because he had described an intermaxillary bone. This bone, Vesalius observed, is found in the lower animals but not in man. Sylvius (1614-72) defends Galen on the ground that though man had no intermaxillary bone at present this is no proof of its absence in Galen's time. "It is luxury, it is sensuality, which has gradually deprived man of this bone." This passage, as Osborn remarks, proves that the idea of degeneration of structures through disuse, as well as the idea of the inheritance of the effect of habit, or the "transmission of acquired characters," is a very ancient one. Sylvius, while here recognising factors of degeneracy, erred in considering disappearance of the intermaxillary bone, not reappearance, as degeneracy. He failed to recognise, moreover, the law of economy of growth by which one structure is sacrificed for another or for the organism as a whole. This law, indicated by Aristotle, but clearly outlined by Goethe in 1807, and Geoffroy St. Hilaire in 1818, underlies the physiological atrophies and hypertrophies which play such a part in degeneracy.

The Twelve Cæsars of Suetonius (that stud book of imperial degeneracy as it has been styled) stamps the decided impression on its readers that Hippocratian notions of degenerate heredity strongly permeated Roman thought, to revive in those Arabic, Italian, and British (Roger Bacon) thinkers who created the scientific phase of the revival of learning.

In the science of medicine, as developed by Hippocrates, the modern conception of degeneracy is evident. Hippocrates argues against the "sacred" nature of epilepsy, since it is a hereditary disease and hence comes under the operation of physical law. He furthermore points out, as did Aristotle, that epilepsy produced in the ancestor by traumatism and other physical causes may be inherited by the child.

As the degeneration phase of evolution was less antagonistic to the religious theory forced into biblical dogma by the Jesuit Suarez (in opposition to the evolutionary views of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas), being supported by biblical dicta (that when the fathers had eaten sour grapes the children's teeth were set on edge) and fetichistic folklore, it retained a dominance that the advanced phase lost. From the time of Hippocrates, psychiatry (the science devoted to mental disorders) continued to accumulate data of the origin and transmission of human defects. The impetus given the evolutionary explanation of these data by the seventeenth and eighteenth century biologists (Harvey, Buffon, Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, and others) laid the foundation for the modern doctrine of degeneracy.

Buffon remarks that many species are being perfected or degenerated by the great changes in land and sea, by the favours or disfavours of Nature, by food, by the prolonged influences of climate, contrary or favourable, and are no longer what they formerly were. He regarded temperature, food, and climate as the three great factors in the alteration and degeneration of animals.

Erasmus Darwin considers that all life starts from a living filament having the capability of being excited into action by certain stimuli. This capability is that whereby plants and animals react to their environment, causing changes in them which are transmitted to their offspring. All animals undergo transformations which are in part produced by their own exertions in response to pleasures and pains, and many of these acquired forms or propensities are transmitted to their posterity. Other effects of this excitability (such as constitute hereditary diseases, like scrofula, epilepsy, insanity) have their origin in one or perhaps two generations, as in the progeny of those who drink much vinous spirits. Those hereditary propensities cease again if one or two sober generations succeed, otherwise the family becomes extinct.

Benjamin Rush (greatly influenced by the Erasmus Darwin school) remarks that through hereditary sameness of organisation of the nerves, brain and blood vessels, the predisposition to insanity pervades whole families and renders them liable to this disease from a transient and feeble operation of its causes. Insanity when hereditary is excited by more feeble causes than in persons in whom this predisposition has been acquired. It generally attacks the descendants in those stages of life in which it has appeared in the ancestors. Children born previously to the attack of madness in their parents are less liable to inherit it than those who are born after it. Children born of parents who are in the decline of life are more predisposed to insanity than children born under contrary circumstances. A predisposition to certain diseases, seated in parts contiguous to the seat of insanity, often descends from parents to their children. Thus it occurs in a son whose father or mother has been afflicted only with hysteria or habitual headaches. The reverse likewise takes place. There are families in which insanity has existed where the disease has spared the mind in the posterity, but appeared in great strength and eccentricity of the memory and of the passions, or in great perversion of their moral faculties. Sometimes it passes by all the faculties of the mind, and appears only in the nervous system of persons descended from deranged parents; again, madness occurs in children whose parents were remarkable only for eccentricity of mind. Among the diseases that attack the children of the insane, but did not exist in their ancestors, are consumption and epilepsy.

Similar studies were later published by Pinel, Tissot, Chiarrurgi, Stedman, Parkman, Brigham, Prichard, Esquirol, Jacobi, and other American, English, French, Italian, and German alienists. Based upon the data thus obtained, and upon the general principles thus outlined, then appeared--nearly at the same time as the like epoch-making work (on another phase of evolution), Darwin's Origin of Species--Morel's Treatise on Human Degeneracy, wherein the principle of natural selection was shown to involve the recognition of the physical conditions that constitute degeneracy, and, necessarily, to exclude primeval perfection. Morel's definition of degeneration as a marked departure from the original type tending more or less rapidly to the extinction of it, forms the basis of commonly accepted definitions.

While Morel practically outlined the modern study of degeneracy, his theologic timidity forced an absolute definition of a state which, according to his own admission, was purely relative. After fencing somewhat with the position that there was a primevally perfect man, he admits with Tessier the primeval lowness of man, but also thinks that the fall of man could create new conditions which, in his descendants, from heredity and from causes acting on their health, tended to make them depart from the primitive type. These departures from the primitive type have led to varieties, some of which constitute races capable of transmitting racial characteristics. Other varieties in the races themselves have created the abnormal states which Morel has denominated degeneracies. Each of these degeneracies has its own stamp from the cause that produces it. Their common characteristic is hereditary transmission under graver conditions than normal heredity. With certain exceptional instances of regeneration, the progeny of degenerates presents progressive degradation. This may reach such limits that humanity is preserved by its excess. It is not necessary, however, that the ultimate stage of degradation be reached before sterility occurs. Morel confines degeneracy to a pathologic type, criticising F. Heusinger for applying the term degenerate to domestic animals which "throw back" to the wild or original type. Morel's admission that causes influencing health produce deviations which, under favouring conditions, become racial types capable of indefinite transmission, saves him from absolute scientific inaccuracy, but renders inconsistent his limitation of degeneracy. It may be convenient to separate diseased states from anomalies, but such separation can only be very relative. From his conservatism and his plentiful data, Morel aroused much less antagonism than did a contemporary, Moreau (de Tours), who bore to him the relation of Darwin to Wallace. While Moreau devotes much attention to the factors of degeneracy and its stigmata (or marks), like Morel, his main point is the expansion of the theory of Aristotle which Dryden epigrammatised into--

"Great wit to madness nearly is allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide."

As J. G. Kiernan shows, this doctrine, early in the history of the race, obtained dominance through the evolution of arts, sciences, and religions from fetichism. Phenomena manifested by fetich priests (of the Shaman type) so closely resembled epileptic insanity in its frenzies and visions that the two states were long regarded as identical, whence the term "morbus sacer." The supernatural influences which, in current belief, underlay epilepsy were, at the outset, malign or benign as they were offended or placated. They became benign, and the insane were under protection of a deity, as in Mussulman countries. Later still the demon-possession theory gained dominance, and at length the demon sank into disease. Throughout all this evolution the belief in an inherent affinity between insanity and genius persisted.

Aristotle, in whose day the disease notion was becoming dominant, asserts that, under the influence of head congestion, persons sometimes become prophets, sybils, and poets. Thus Mark, the Syracusan, was a pretty fair poet during a maniacal attack, but could not compose when sane. Men illustrious in poetry, arts, and statesmanship are often insane, like Ajax, or misanthropic like Bellerophon. Even at a recent period similar dispositions are evident in Plato, Socrates, Empedocles, and many others, above all, the poets.

According to Plato, "Delirium is by no means evil, but when it comes by gift of the gods, a very great benefit. In delirium the sibyls of Delphi and Dodona were of great service to Greece, but when in cold blood were of little or none. Frequently, when the gods afflicted men with epidemics, a sacred delirium inspired some men with a remedy for these. The Muses excite some souls to delirium to glorify heroes with poetry, or to instruct future generations."

Precedent to the works of Morel and Moreau appeared their source and inspiration, Prosper Lucas's Natural Heredity. Here the biologic current of thought encountered the sociologic current; although the waves clashed, the two currents merged into and modified each other. The biologist demonstrated that degenerate types often "threw back" in their structures, and this very "throwing back" made them the fittest to survive. The sociologist found that the only test of acquired or inherited degeneracy in man was disaccord with environment. The co-existent moral and physical defects resultant on heredity found by Erasmus Darwin, Rush, Parkman, Grohmann, and others tended to show that all types of defectives might be a product of heredity.

These stimulating researches into the sources of crime led to a controversy which reached its height two decades ere the treatise of Morel. To this controversy three suggestive works owed their origin: a psychological treatise by Dr. Lauvergne on felons, a romance with a purpose by Eugène Sue, and a suggestively practical brochure by a rather corrupt police official, Vidocq. Seemingly conflicting as were these productions, all strikingly illustrated the influence of heredity and environment in the production of defectives. To these productions were soon added those of Moreau (de Tours), Attemyer, Eliza Farnham, the American Sampson, Dally, Lélut, Camper, and the older Voisin.

Morel laid the foundation of what is widely known as the Lombroso School by a brochure wherein he proposed to entitle morbid anthropology, "that part of the science of man the aim of which is to study phenomena due to morbid influences and to malign heredity."

To the factor of atavism, inconsistently ignored by Morel, the early embryologic studies of Von Baer and the biologic studies resultant on the transmutation of species lent special emphasis. Three possibilities of life await, as Wilson remarks, each living being: either it remains primitive and unchanged, or it progresses toward a higher type, or it backslides and retrogresses. The factors underlying the stable state force the animal to remain as it is; those underlying the progressive tendency make it more elaborate, while the factors of degeneration, on the other hand, tend to simplify its structure. It requires no special thought to perceive that progress is a great fact of nature. The development of every animal and plant shows the possibilities of nature in this direction. But the bearings of physiological backsliding are not so clearly seen.

That certain animals degenerate or retrogress in their development is susceptible of ready and familiar illustration. No better illustration is needed than is derived from the domain of parasitic existence. When an animal or plant attaches itself partly or wholly to another living being, and becomes more or less dependent upon the latter for support and nourishment, it exhibits, as a rule, retrogression and degeneration. The parasitic "guest" dependent on its "host" for lodging alone, or it may be for both board and lodging, is in a fair way to become degraded in structure, and, as a rule, exhibits marked degradation where the association has persisted sufficiently long. Parasitism and servile dependence act very much in structural lower life as analogous instances of mental dependence on others act on man.

The destruction of characteristic individuality and the extinction of personality are natural results of that form of association wherein one form becomes absolutely dependent on another for all the conditions of life. A life of mere attachment exhibits similar results, and organs of movement disappear by the law of disuse. A digestive system is a superfluity to an animal which, like the tapeworm, obtains its food ready made in the very kitchen, so to speak, of its host. Hence the lack of digestive apparatus follows the finding of a free commissariat by the parasite. Organs of sense are not necessary for an attached and rooted animal; these latter, therefore, go by the board and the nervous system itself becomes modified and altered. Degradation wholesale and complete is the penalty the parasite has to pay for its free board and lodging; and in this fashion Nature may be said to revenge the host for the pains and troubles wherewith, like Job of old, he may be tormented.

The most emphatic biologic degeneration is that discovered by Kowalevsky in the sea squirt, which, in its larval state, is a vertebrate, and when adult is an ascidian, seemingly far below the cuttlefish and the worms. This strikingly illustrates that, as Ray Lankester has said, degeneration is a gradual change of structure by which the organism becomes adapted to less varied and less complex conditions of life; a reverse of evolution which proceeds from the indefinite and homogeneous to the definite and heterogeneous with a loss of explosive force due to the acquirement of inhibitions or checks.

This principle of biologic degeneration, long recognised, was most lucidly enforced by Dohrn, whose views were later extended by Ray Lankester. The parallelism of animal degeneracy with that of man, so clearly evident even in the parasitic nature of defectives, was, as Meynert showed, due to the fact that the fore-brain is an inhibitory apparatus against the lower and more instinctive natural impulses. The higher its development the greater is the tendency to subordinate the particular to the general. Even in insects a high social growth occurs, as in the bee and ant communities. The same is the case in the development of man; in the infant, a being entirely wrapped in its instincts of self-preservation, the "primary ego" is predominant and the child is an egotistic parasite. As development goes on this standpoint is passed, conscience assumes its priority, the fore-brain acts as a check on the purely vegetative functions and the "secondary ego" takes precedence over the primary one; this is the general order of society, designated as civilisation or social order. If this inhibition become weakened or disordered, predominance of the natural instincts or impulses occurs, and when it is totally lost the individual is in the position of a criminal who opposes the ethical order of society--a parasite, and one of the worst kind who not only lives upon his host but destroys him in doing so.

Hence degenerate tendencies are reversions in type indicating the original source of the inhibition.

The tree of Moreau illustrates clearly the essential principles of these inter-relations of defect, further elucidated by the observations of Sander on the connection of deformed central nervous systems with mental and moral disorder.

NERVOUS HEREDITY.

{ Science { Music. Exceptional Intelligence { Arts { Painting. { Letters

{ { Paretic dementia. { { Paralyses. { Brain { Tumours. Lesions of the Nerve Centres { { Brain Softening. { { Congestion. { { { Softening of Spinal { Spinal Cord { Cord. { { Myelitis.

{ Epilepsy. { Chorea. Neuroses { Stammering. { Convulsive Fits. { Hysteria.

{ Utopians. Intellectual States { Eccentrics. { Mixed Conditions.

{ Prostitutes. Emotional States { Criminals. { Unstable.

Neuralgia { External. { Internal.

{ { Symptomatical. { Acute Insanity { Idiopathic. { { Alcoholic. Psychoses { Imbecility { Idiocy { General Insanity. { Chronic Insanity { Dementia. { Partial Insanity.

{ Congenital { Blindness. Special and General Conditions of the Senses { Anæsthesiæ. { Deafness. { Hyperæsthesiæ.

Nutritional Defect.

The extensive studies of Niepce, Vogt, and others on idiot biology sought to show that the brain was not merely arrested in development, but sometimes reverted even as low as the sauropsida type (reptiles and birds). Grohmann, as early as 1820, had "often been impressed in criminals, especially in those of defective development, by the prominent ears, the shape of the cranium, the projecting cheek-bones, the large lower jaws, the deeply placed eyes, the shifty, animal-like gaze."

Maudsley observes that in the case of such an extreme morbid variety as a congenital idiot we have to do with a defective nervous organisation. Marchand, in the brain of two idiots of European descent, found the convolutions fewer in number, individually less complex, broader and smoother than in the apes. The condition results neither from atrophy nor mere arrest of growth, but consists essentially in an imperfect evolution of the cerebral hemispheres or their parts, dependent on an arrest of development. The proportion of the weight of brain to that of body is extraordinarily diminished. With the brain of the orang type comes a corresponding defect of function. With this animal type of brain in idiocy sometimes appear animal traits and instincts. One class of idiots is justly designated theroid, so brute-like are its members.

The human brain in the course of foetal development passes through the same stages as other vertebrate brains, and to some extent these transitional stages resemble the permanent forms of their brain. Summing up, as it were, in itself the leading forms of vertebrate type, there is truly a brute brain within the man's, and when the latter stops short of its characteristic development, it is natural that it should manifest only its most primitive functions.

It must, however, be pointed out that the human brain, even of the idiot or microcephales, never resembles, as a whole, the brain of any anthropoid or lower animal form. Such a position was maintained by Vogt, but has long since been abandoned. The existing anthropoid apes are not the ancestors of man, and have pursued a different development.

Despine's researches revealed the absence of human checks on the instinctive tendencies in criminals. He, however, started from the doctrine of moral imbecility as elaborated by Rush, Prichard, Brigham, Ray, Galt, and others. Bruce Thomson, testing Despine's results by primitive races and Scotch criminals, found that defective, abnormal, and anomalous states of the instinctive faculties exist in entire races and in the "moral idiots" that occur in the best races. Criminals form a variety of the human family quite distinct from law-abiding men. A low type of physique indicating a deteriorated character gives a family likeness due to the fact that they form a community which retrogrades from generation to generation. The low physical condition of juvenile criminals in reformatories, &c., becomes at once obvious if they be compared with healthy, active school children. They are puny, sickly, scrofulous, often deformed, with peculiar, unnaturally developed heads, sluggish, stupid, liable to fits, mean in figure, and defective in vital energy, while at the same time they are irritable, violent, and too often quite incorrigible. The adults usually have a singularly stupid and insensate look. The complexion is bad. The outlines of the head are harsh and angular. The boys are ugly in feature, and have, as a rule, repulsive appearances. These diseases of criminals are a proof of their low type and deteriorated condition. Their deaths are mainly due to tubercular diseases and affections of the nervous system. In the greater number crime is hereditary, a tendency which is, in most cases, associated with bodily defect, such as spinal deformities, stammering or other imperfect speech, club-foot, cleft-palate, hare-lip, deformed jaws and teeth, deaf-mutism, congenital blindness, paralysis, epilepsy, and scrofula.

Elisha Harris, of New York, among 233 convicts found 54 to belong to families in which insanity, epilepsy, and other neuroses existed. Eighty-three per cent. belonged to a criminal, pauper, or inebriate stock, and were, therefore, hereditarily or congenitally affected. Nearly 76 per cent. of their number hence proved habitual criminals. According to Harris, crime, pauperism, and insanity revert into each other, so that insanity in the parent produces crime or pauperism in the offspring, or, vice versâ, crime or pauperism in the parent produces disease or insanity in the offspring. Campagne, Broca, G. Wilson, and others about the same time made similar researches.

The American sociologist, Samuel Royce, after a careful study of American and European defective classes, found that observation of the hereditary nature of pauperism which congenitally reverts into insanity, disease or crime, leaves no doubt but that pauperism is one of the worst forms of race deterioration, and that the paralysis of the human will and its energies is but the result of a fearful dissolution in progress.

Extensive researches made by Charles S. Hoyt, of the New York State Board of Charities (1874), into the origin of the defective classes of that state, show that the pauper, hysteric, epileptic, prostitute, criminal, born-blind, deaf-mute, paranoiac, recurrent lunatic and idiot were buds of the same tree of degenerate heredity. E. C. Spitzka, basing his researches on the principles of Morel as expanded and critically applied by Meynert, reached essentially the same results as also did Westphal, Krafft-Ebing, Grille, Kerlin, Axel Key, Magnan, Foville, Bjornstrom, Amadei, Schüle, Nicolson, Tonnini, Tamburini, Verga, Tamassia, Kowalevsky, and it may be said the German Psychiatrical Society (which, by accepting a conception of the distortion of mental faculties otherwise seemingly high, based on brain deformity rather than disease, accepted the degeneracy doctrine of to-day).

For several decades, moreover, the stigmata of degeneracy have appeared in French, German, Austrian, Russian, Italian, and Scandinavian court reports as evidence of hereditary defects.

As often happens in science--

"Thought by thought is piled till some great truth Is loosened and the nations echo round."

Wherefore about this period (1870-78) appeared the first volume of the epoch-making work of Cesare Lombroso, who, erroneously credited with being the apostle of the modern doctrine of degeneracy, has admittedly done more to stimulate research than any other investigator. This work exerted an influence at first in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the Scandinavian countries, while on the English-speaking countries, despite the apparently fertile soil prepared for it, its influence was seemingly slight. Under the degradation produced in many American charitable and correctional institutions by corruption, naturally resultant on a civil war, science therein was at a decided discount between 1861 and 1881. A school arose which, defying the individualistic rule of English common law underlying the institutions of the United States, pandered to mob-law and theologic prejudice by denying certain well-ascertained facts in human degeneracy. This school, represented at the Guiteau trial by the experts for the prosecution, denied heredity and that moral defect could result from physical abnormality. This school, however, was by no means representative of American psychiatry or sociology. Rush, Brigham, James MacDonald, Gait, McFarland, W. W. Godding, Ray, C. H. Hughes, Kerlin, Patterson, Wilbur, Fisher, J. H. McBride, C. H. Nichols, C. A. Folsom, Cowles, and others accepted Morel's principles. Spitzka, long ere the trial, pointed out that criminals displayed the stigmata of Morel, and that the more intellectual types of insanity were based on brain deformity rather than disease.

Benedikt, of Vienna, in 1879 stated that "criminals generally have nothing analogous to monomaniacs. They tend to develop distinct peculiarities of organisation and psychic features, and these peculiarities are the product of their social condition." J. G. Kiernan, reviewing his work, remarked that any one who had at all examined the question would be convinced that between the true criminal type, the imbecile and the paranoiac (primäre verrückt) the psychological relations and their anatomical bases are intimate and close. Had Benedikt examined the insane and criminals, not for convolutional aberrations alone, but also for heterotopias, &c., he would never have written the sentence just quoted.

W. W. Godding, commenting on the evidence of J. P. Gray, the leader of the American school that denies degeneracy, feelingly remarked that "the disordered mind does not cease to be a unit although the observed manifestations of its insanity may seem to be confined in some cases to the emotion; in others to the affection; and in still others to the intellectual powers. We cannot deny that the old masters were as keen-sighted observers as ourselves. I dislike to hear drunkenness called dipsomania, as I so often do; but I do not therefore say that dipsomania is only drunkenness. It might improve my standing with the legal fraternity if I should pronounce kleptomania only another name for stealing, but my personal observations convince me that the insane have sometimes a disposition to steal, which is a direct result of their disease, and for which they are no more accountable than the puerperal maniac is for her oaths.

"And now, after all these years of careful research, and our asylum reports rendered bulky with long tables prepared with so much care, involving inquiry on the origin of the disease not alone in the direct family line, but in the collateral branches also; just when the medical profession has come to believe that if one fact in medical science be better established than another, it is that insanity is hereditary, and we undertake in the present case to look up hereditary predisposition, and the family disposition likewise, we are met with the withering conundrum, 'Can a man inherit insanity from his uncle?' and we are told that there is no such thing as hereditary insanity. Yes, gentlemen, I understand you; the tendency to the disease is inherited. And so in the strict use of language there is no such thing as insane delusion; but we know that language is seldom used with scientific exactness, and no one is at a loss to understand what we mean when we say that Jones is full of insane delusions, insanity being hereditary in his family. Yes, and if Jones should marry an insane woman, the chances are good that Jones's son will turn out crazy, no matter how carefully he may be brought up under the direction of the most eminent psychist, for that little germ which you call 'a tendency'--so minute that it will elude your most careful scrutiny with scalpel and microscope--is a fixed fact, and will prove more potent than all theories. Not born there; develops. Ah, how is it that science shows us that syphilis and small-pox and tubercle are born in the offspring, that the infant comes into the world with spina bifida, idiotic, hydrocephalic, acephalic, that the child is blind and mute and misshapen in his mother's womb, but is never insane? Because, forsooth, we have seen fit to limit insanity to disease of the brain, and disease is not inherited. Is it possible that in all these years it has not been Dr. Gray's lot as it has been mine to be consulted about those 'queer' children of insane parentage, who are perverse from the start? Will he say that the perverseness is only a 'badness' which should be whipped out of the child? But that has generally been thoroughly tried before the physician is consulted. Heterodox I know it is, but observed facts compel me to be heterodox with Prichard and Esquirol and Ray, with Morel and Griesinger and Maudsley, and I know not how many others, in recognising in some cases a condition of inherent defect born in the individual, and not a result of education--a condition which writers have recognised under various names as hereditary mental disorder, insane diathesis, insane temperament."

The Guiteau trial so stimulated studies of degeneracy that two experts for the prosecution, A. McL. Hamilton and H. M. Stearns, later changed their views as to degeneracy, while C. L. Dana, a strong supporter of the Gray school in 1881, subsequently made valuable contributions to the literature of the degeneracy stigmata. The position then taken by Spitzka and Kiernan as to the cerebral basis of degeneracy was in 1882 supported by H. Howard, of Montreal; Workman, of Toronto; Kerlin, of Pennsylvania; Osler, of Baltimore; and C. K. Mills, of Philadelphia.

It was during 1881, moreover, that Jacobi made extensive studies of degeneracy in royalty and aristocracy, as earlier had Ireland.

From the time of Itard degenerate phenomena in idiots had been traced to cerebral mal-development. Kerlin pointed out that "epileptic change" in them was marked by moral alteration similar in explosive characters to that so frequently observed in criminals. In England students of idiocy like Clouston, Shuttleworth, Beach, Ireland, Langdon Down, and others, had early brought the recognition of its inter-relations with insanity, crime and neuroses into strong relief. To the studies of Bruce Thomson, Maudsley, and Nicolson, Tyndall gave strong support from the actual experience of a governor of a great British prison, who found that the prisoners in his charge might be divided into three distinct classes: the first class consisted of persons who ought never to have been in prison; external accident and not internal taint had brought them within the grasp of the law, and what had happened to them might happen to most of us; they were essentially men of sound moral stamina, though wearing the prison garb. Then came the largest class, formed of individuals possessing no strong bias, moral or immoral, plastic to the touch of circumstances which would mould them into either good or evil members of society. Thirdly, came a class, happily not a large one, whom no kindness could conciliate and no discipline tame. They were sent into the world labelled "incorrigible," wickedness being stamped, as it were, upon their organisation.

With the close of the year 1883 the degeneracy doctrine may be regarded as having practically been accepted in biology, in anthropology, in sociology, in criminology, in psychiatry, and general pathology. Debate was henceforth not as to its existence, but as to its limitations. Precedent to 1835 determinism in popular thought due to Calvinistic predestination had, in English-speaking countries, fought for the doctrine; subsequent thereto the theologic reaction against Calvinism was a strong opposing force, whose influence was finally destroyed by the practically general acceptance of the doctrine of evolution in the late seventies.