Of 359 cases observed by Dr. Howe, 17 were known to be the children of parents nearly related in blood. The history of these 17 families, the heads of which being blood relatives intermarried, showed that there were other causes to increase the chances of an infirm offspring, besides that of intermarriages, as most of the parents were intemperate or scrofulous; some were both the one and the other. There were born unto them 95 children, of whom 44 were idiotic, 12 others were scrofulous and puny, one was deaf, and one was a dwarf! In one family of 8 children, 5 were idiotic.[9] Dr. Ireland, who has investigated this point with great minuteness, pertinently remarks that it has been the custom to collect instances of cousins who have married, and have had unhealthy children, as if this never happened to anyone else; and he adds that "the proper way to examine the question clearly, is to find what is the proportion of marriages of blood relations in a given population, and then to inquire if there be in the issue of such marriages a larger percentage of insane, idiotic, or otherwise unhealthy children."[10] There cannot be a doubt that consanguinity has hitherto been considered too great a factor in the production of idiocy, and that in weighing the evidence, we must not lose sight of the fact that in many cases recorded, other factors beside intermarriage of relatives have contributed concurrently to the development of the mental defect.[11] _Educational Overpressure._ There is one cause of idiocy which has been pointed out by Dr. Séguin, and which he says is due to the unsatisfactory social conditions under which women of the present day exist. "As soon," he says, "as women assumed the anxieties pertaining to both sexes, they gave birth to children whose like had hardly been met with thirty years ago."[12] Great prominence has lately been given to this subject by an oration on "Sex in Education," by Sir James Crichton Browne, at the Medical Society of London, in which he called attention to the "growing tendency to ignore intellectual distinctions between the sexes, to assimilate the education of girls to that of boys, and to throw men and women into industrial competition in every walk of life." Elsewhere, he adds, that "to throw women into competition with men is to insure to them a largely increased liability to organic nervous disease.... Woe betide the generation that springs from mothers amongst whom gross nervous degenerations abound." Sir J.C. Browne supports his views by showing that there are organic cerebral differences between men and women, and that therefore they must be educated in different ways, being destined to play different parts on the stage of human life.[13]