THE topics of Incontinence, Celibacy, and Marriage, having been severally considered relatively to their effects on society, viewed alike also as to their influence on the health and happiness of the sexes in general, another equally engrossing one naturally presents itself for inquiry to every thinking and sensible person who may contemplate, or be about embarking in what the world deems “a serious speculation,” matrimony, namely, the probability of issue, and how far the health of the progeny may be influenced by that of the parents. That conception requires the necessary aptitudes in both man and wife is indisputable; and that although such capacities are rarely absent, still all unions are not prolific; hence the inference, that some cause must exist to account for such infertility. It may be local or moral, as elsewhere in this volume explained, which not being the main purport of this paper, needs no other allusion beyond the mere reference. The prevailing resemblance between parents and children in features, form, voice, and even constitutional peculiarities, is sufficiently well known to satisfy any one of the similar possibility of the transmission of disease, or sound health. “It is of great consequence to be well-born; and it were happy for human kind, if only such persons as are sound of body and mind should be allowed to marry.” We find in Boethius’s work, “De veterum Scotorum Moribus,” that anciently, in Scotland, if any were visited with the falling sickness, madness, gout, leprosy, or any such dangerous disease, which was likely to be propagated from the father to the son, he was instantly gelded; a woman kept from all company of men; and, if by chance, having some such disease, she were to be found with child, she with her offspring was buried alive. The Spartans destroyed all weakly and deformed children.