Can any question be imagined in life, in regard to which you ought so deliberately to pause, investigate and weigh all the bearings of the case? And yet can any other important transaction be named, upon which, in this view, so little thought is bestowed, and which is entered into with such reckless blindness to consequences? He, who determines to respect the laws of his being, will study his own temperament, and that of the other party, and weigh the excesses and defects, as one convinced by the general analogy of animated nature, that the physical and mental character, the constitutional and moral temperament of the offspring, in the ordinary course of things, will be a compound of that of the parents. If he find himself subject to any peculiar corporeal infirmity, hereditary tendency to disease, overbearing propensities towards indulgence, or excess, unbalanced passions, or morbid mental obliquity, he will be studiously solicitous, that the other party shall not be laboring under similar disqualifications. I may not follow out the subordinate details. Your thoughts cannot but suggest innumerable considerations, that I pass in silence. Will any moral being, capable of conscientious views of the ultimate bearing of his actions, dare to treat this subject, all momentous as it is, with unphilosophic levity and ridicule? Will any one say, that such discussions ought to be pretermitted by a parent? I affirm, that such are not my notions of the obligations of decorum and propriety. The world has been too long peopled with mere animals bound by the laws, and doomed to the responsibilities of rationality, and yet acting like the orders below them, without a capacity for finding their happiness. If, being men, and inheriting either the privileges, or the doom of men, we will choose to consider ourselves merely as animals, shall we dare to arraign Providence, or fill the world with murmurs, if we enjoy not the peculiar pleasures of either race, and are subject to the miseries of both? When you are aware that such considerations must affect not only your own happiness, or misery, but that of your offspring, a whole coming generation, and the hopes of the regeneration and improvement of a world, you will be sensible, that silence in such a discussion would be guilty pride. I perfectly coincide with the conclusions of Combe upon this subject, and transcribe for your benefit an admirable exposition of my views from the notes appended to his book on the _Constitution of Man_.