This brain-mechanism is as much a product of ancestry as is any other structure of the body, and it is obvious therefore that imperfect adjustments of its structure must be as subject to the laws of inheritance as are other malformations of the body. And just as with other defects, mental disorders may thus flow from pre-existing ancestral maladjustment of the nervous system or from immediate causes thrust upon it, such as syphilis, alcoholism, degeneration of the blood vessels and traumata. Or, in other words, the mechanism of mentality may be faulty from the beginning, or it may be made faulty by bad environmental conditions. The records of the inheritance of insanity, imbecility, feeble-mindedness and other forms of nervous and mental defects are truly startling. Active researches in this field have been in progress now for several years, and as each new set of investigations comes in the tale is always the same. It is questionable if there is a single genuine case on record where a normal child has been born from a union of two imbeciles. Yet the universal tendency is for defective to mate with defective. Davenport gives a list of examples, beginning with such a one as this: "A feeble-minded man of thirty-eight has a delicate wife who in twenty years has borne him nineteen defective children." Little wonder, in the light of such facts as these, that the number of degenerates is rapidly increasing in what are called civilized countries. =Many Mental Defectives Married.--=But, it may be urged, these are exceptional cases, there is surely no considerable number of mental defectives who are married. Let us look at the available facts. In Great Britain in 1901, of 60,000 known feeble-minded, imbeciles and idiots, 19,000 were married, and in the same year, of 117,000 lunatics, 47,000 were married; that is, a sum-total of 66,000 mentally defective individuals were legally multiplying, or had had the opportunity to multiply their kind, to say nothing of the unmarried who were known to have produced children. In the state of Wisconsin I note from the tenth biennial report of the Board of Control that of 574 patients admitted to the Northern Hospital for the Insane during the year from July 1, 1908, to June 30, 1909, 274 were married and 29 others were known to have been married; this is a total of 303 out of 574, considerably over half. At the Wisconsin State Hospital for the Insane we find the conditions are no better, for out of 499 admitted in the year 1909-10, 208 were married and 65 others had at some time been married, or a total of 273 out of 499. There is every reason to believe that conditions are approximately similar in other states.