Kiernan has had under observation a Nova Scotian family of Scotch extraction, the mother of which continued to bear children until she was 63 years old. There had been no pregnancy between 50 and 56. At 56 a son was born who had ear, jaw and skull stigmata, and became a periodical lunatic at 25. A son, born a year after, was a six-fingered idiot, with retinitis pigmentosa. (These last expressions of degeneracy are, as Darier[130] has shown, often associated. Darier's cases had the following hereditary antecedents: One father had hemeralopia; one mother had defective vision; a grandfather was blind at 30; a grandfather was blind in one eye, and an uncle had congenital iris coloboma. Only one patient examined did not have hemeralopic descendants. Six patients examined belonged to five different families, all consisting of five or six children, one-third of whom had hemeralopia. Among thirty-five children there were eleven hemeralopes and two six-fingered children, who died too young to determine the existence of retinitis pigmentosa. The disease in all began in childhood, and hemeralopia was absent in but one case.) Three of the next children (two boys and a girl) became paralytic idiots in infancy. Here the degeneracy was expressed in that tendency to miliary aneurismal weakness of arteries to which E. C. Spitzka,[131] called attention over a decade ago. One of the next children was a periodically sexual invert female. The last child was an epileptic. The children born before the age of fifty were normal and averaged 60 years of age. Matthews Duncan,[132] Arthur Mitchell, and Langdon Down, have called attention to the influence of premature and late marriage in the production of idiocy. Factors capable of producing idiocy are of course capable of producing less decided expressions of degeneracy. CHAPTER V INTERMIXTURE OF RACES Defoe, in his _Trueborn Englishman_, outlines a factor of great importance in degeneracy.[133] Race intermixture is much more common than is generally believed, owing to that ethnologic error consequent on the discovery of Sanscrit, which tests race by speech. Keane[134] excellently explodes this error by the following table: Peoples. Race. Speech.