It must be admitted that geniuses and men of extraordinary talent appear in families tainted with insanity, and, indeed, that comparatively few families have had distinguished men among them for several generations without also showing a considerable number of insane members. Schopenhauer, “mad Jack Byron's son,” and Johnson—who said that his inheritance made him mad all his life—are conspicuous examples of this well-known fact; and it is also observed that children and grandchildren of men distinguished for their great intellectual powers are subjects of degenerative mental disorders, or at least are of less than ordinary mental capacity and moral force. The sound and the unsound, too, may exist together in the same mind, each acting in certain ways independently of the other, and cerebro-mental disease not seldom, occurs in persons of the highest intellectual attainments. Dean Swift, with his delusion that parts of his body were made of glass; Bishop Butler, tormented all his life by his morbid fancies; Chatterton, committing suicide in an attic; Rousseau, Tasso, Pascal, Comte, Beethoven, Charles Lamb, John Bunyan, the author of _Rab and His Friends_, Schumann, Shelley, Cowper, Swedenborg, and the epileptics Julius Cæsar, Mohammed, and Napoleon,—are only a few of the many illustrations of this law. In the descending scale from insanity we find also crime, drunkenness, and all sorts of moral perversions, which may be its antecedents also. Even a man's self-indulgences may be intensified as mental or moral degeneration in his children. The degenerative processes may go on where there is intellectual stagnation in small communities, with the vices of civilization, as well as in the crowd, producing a large class of persons for whom doctors have only compassion, considering them as invalids although treated as responsible by law and society. It is difficult to estimate the influence of intermarriage as predisposing to insanity. The history of the early Ptolemies, of numerous savage or uncivilized races, and of many selected cases in the enlightened world may be quoted to show that it is often attended with no evil results; and there are other causes of degeneration in the royal families and aristocracies of Europe and in the cases of individuals where intermarriage of relations has resulted in deterioration of stock. It is, at all events, certain that marriages may be made so as to intensify morbid tendencies or so as to eliminate them—to produce a race of clear heads with sober judgment, or a race part of whom shall be great sufferers from neuralgia or mental pain; another part ill-balanced or explorers in fields of thought and action never tried by calmer intellects, perhaps with now and then at {116} long intervals a genius; a third part morbid and brilliant or stupid and imbecile; and still a fourth part near enough to the normal standard of mental health.