Marriage-prohibitions still exist to-day. The difference is merely this, that in place of the ecclesiastical prohibitions and the civil prohibitions affecting members of the lower classes, moral, hygienic, and economic prohibitions and hindrances have come into being, affecting the middle classes. The State, as a rule, insists upon absolute celibacy in the case of its female employees. Soldiers and officers are hemmed in by rigid regulations, by which marriage is to a large extent rendered impossible; in the case of the proletariat, the liability to compulsory military service offers the greatest obstacle to early marriage. From Catholic priests, ecclesiastical prohibitions demand absolute celibacy. As the result of these various marriage-prohibitions, many persons who would probably have been able to procreate healthy children are prevented marrying. But there is to-day hardly any difficulty in the way of the marriage of persons whose union is likely to lead to the procreation of defective children. At most, minors, certified lunatics, confirmed drunkards, wards in chancery, and near relatives are forbidden to marry. _Proposed Reforms._--Increasing attention is, however, being paid to the possible legal applications of the doctrine of evolution. Even those who are opposed to any radical reforms see that persons suffering from communicable venereal disease must be unconditionally forbidden, on pain of very severe punishment, not merely to contract marriage, not merely to practise sexual intercourse, but to perform any act, of whatever kind, by which they could communicate infection. The existing state of the law, by which, notwithstanding the great frequency of such occurrences, isolated instances only of the transmission of venereal diseases are punished (for example, the case of the nurse who infects the child entrusted to her care), is altogether unsatisfactory; the communication of any kind of venereal infection, in any possible way, should be severely punished. Those who recognise the need for improving the human species by purposive selection go much further than this. They desire that every person with regard to whom there is strong reason to believe that his or her offspring would be diseased, and every man or woman in a state in which he or she would transmit infection to the sexual partner, should be stringently forbidden to marry. Such persons are: those with disease of the central nervous system, mental disorder, mental weakness, epilepsy, hysteria, idiocy; those with diminished moral responsibility; those suffering from syphilis, gonorrhœa, tuberculosis, rachitis; cripples, &c.