=A criticism of terms.=--In order that this distinction may be clear and never forgotten, it is well to look to our vocabulary--words being good servants but bad masters. We should certainly have this vocabulary purged altogether of a certain word in common and uncritical employment, especially by the medical profession. This is the thoroughly misleading, indeterminate and useless word “congenital.” Not on one occasion in a hundred of its use does any examined meaning attach to it. The word is commonly used as the equivalent of innate, inherent, inborn or germinal. Now nothing is truly innate or inborn save what was present in the germ. But with childish confusion of thought, we persist in attaching quite undeserved importance to the _birth_ of those animals which are brought forth “alive”--as if a bird's egg were not alive. Hence we speak of any character present at birth as congenital, and then we assume that congenital is synonymous with inherent or germinal. But it is an irrelevant detail that a young mammal happens to leave its mother at the ninth week or month. During the whole period that it spends within its mother, it is to be regarded as an individual organism with its own environment. If that environment so affects it as to strangle a limb, the result is an acquirement, though it may be present at birth. An acquirement is an acquirement, whether it be acquired five minutes or months before, or five minutes or months after, the change of environment which we call birth. Thus a character may be congenital--that is, present at birth--but not inherent or germinal, not inborn at the _real birth_, which was the union of the maternal and paternal germ-cells at conception. Such congenital characters are really acquirements, and--poisonings apart--are not transmissible. In common discussion this distinction is wholly ignored; and two distinct things, fundamentally different in origin and in potency, are lumped together under the blessed word “congenital.”