Great as the anxiety may be to perpetuate our identities, to create new objects on whom we may concentrate all our affections and love, and who, when born to us, so instinctively bind us the more to this already attractive world, where is the man who does not feel humbled and mortified at beholding in his anxiously looked-for offspring, the unfolding of infirmity and disease? We are content to encounter the ordinary chances of mortality, let but our children bear the impress of health, and possess the shape of perfect man; but sad and desolating are the reflections that spring from observing in our issue the developments of the evils we have nurtured in ourselves. How many existing beings are there, inhaling the breath of life, in whom every respiration feeds the flame of disease, ignited by those from whose loins they sprung, and is hastening them to a premature tomb. How many are there, secluded from the enjoyment of that, which being deprived of by some scrofulous, pestilential, or other hideous deformity, renders them like isolated wanderers on the earth, and for ever forbids their participation in the main charm of existence—social intercourse. How many living specimens of human prototypes, in whom reason is obliterated, or never dawned, drag on an existence inferior in enjoyment to the forest-hunted beast, or the animal whose life is yielded for the nutriment of man. And are not the diseases that involve so calamitous a result, consumption, scrofula, gout, idiocy, or insanity, traceable in particular families, to the remotest periods of their ancestral records? And should not then a knowledge of cause and effect, like that just detailed, induce individuals about to fulfil one of the purposes to which they were certainly destined, for the perpetuation of their own race, if only from the pride of human nature, well to consider the result of such a consummation? The health of either party is generally omitted among the categories bandied about preliminary to the completion of the other, though decidedly not more important, arrangements of the nuptial contract; or if it should not be, many infirmities, that are well known to descend hereditarily, are (granted in some cases not premeditatedly, but from ignorance of such a result) yet carefully concealed. Cutaneous blemishes, incipient tubercles, or a scrofulous predisposition, which may be likened to the germes of a fruitful plant sown in a torpid soil, lie in ambush, and await some genial transplantation to display their productiveness, which matrimony, by the analogous change which it effects in different constitutions, speedily encourages. In this manner, other morbid phenomena are aroused from their lurking place, whether it be in the brain, the lungs, or the blood, and transferred to those who succeed us.