In 1869 the New York State Medical Society[118] appointed a committee to investigate the influence of consanguineous marriages upon the offspring. Their results show clearly that if the family be free from degenerate taint, marriage among its members in no way diminishes the chances of healthy offspring. This conclusion is in accord with the findings of recent investigators like Anstie, George Darwin, and A. H. Huth, according to whom there is no greater amount of morbidity or abnormality among the offspring of consanguineous parents than among the children of parents not so related, provided the parents be equally free from tendency to disease or degeneration. With a perfectly healthy stock, as every breeder of animals knows, remarks Strahan,[119] "in-and-in breeding" may be practised with impunity, but where the stock is tainted with disease or imperfection, safety is only to be found in "crossing." Where the error lay in the old doctrine, upon which was founded the prohibition of consanguineous unions, was not, as Strahan remarks, in asserting that disease and deformity were more often met with in children of these than in those of other unions, for such is true, but attributing these unhappy results to the mere fact that the parents were related by blood. Over and above the fact that these consanguineous marriages are almost certain to transmit in an accentuated form any defect or tendency to disease already present in the family, there is no physiological reason why such marriages should not take place. Breeders of prize stock frequently breed "in and in," not only with impunity, but with marked benefit. But this fact, while going to prove that it is not the mere blood relationship of the parents which induces the degeneration so often found in the children of consanguineous marriages, can but rarely be advanced as an argument in support of the marriage of blood relations. The stock-raiser only permits the more perfect members of his flocks and herds to continue their kind, and for this reason the "in-and-in" breeding is innocuous, just as it would be in the human family under like conditions. But where shall we find the perfect human family? Such families are certainly rare. The laws of natural life have been so strained and perverted that almost every family nowadays has a taint or twist of some kind, and as all such imperfections are transmitted and rapidly deepened and fixed in the family by the intermarriage of its members, it is best that such unions should be forbidden.