nearly related in temperament than cousins, or even nearer blood relations who have experienced widely different modes of life. This "social consanguinity" is the great curse which dogs every exclusive tribe and class, and hurries them to extinction. It has largely aided real or family consanguinity in the production of the diseases and degenerations which have so heavily fallen upon the aristocracies and royal families of Europe. A crucial test of the opposing positions taken respectively in such a positive manner by Bemiss and Strahan would be a family intermarrying extensively, but placed under favouring conditions unlikely of themselves to create degeneracy. Excellent cases of this kind are furnished by Bourgeois[120] and Thiébault.[121] Bourgeois gives the history of his own family, which was the issue of a union of the third degree of consanguinity. During the ensuing 160 years there were ninety-one marriages, of which sixteen were consanguineous. All of these latter were productive. There was not a single case of malformation, or other physical or mental disease in the offspring. Thiébault reports the case of a slave-dealer who died in the year 1849 at Whidah, Dahomey, leaving behind him four hundred disconsolate widows, and about one hundred children. By the order of the king the whole family were interned in a particular district, where reigned the most complete promiscuity. In 1863 there were children of the third generation. Thiébault, after verifying these facts, states that at that time, although these people were born from all degrees of incestuous unions, there was not a single instance of deaf-mutism, albinism, blindness, cretinism, or other congenital malformation. From these cases it is evident that the position of Strahan is not too strongly taken.