The evils of a too rapid succession of pregnancies are likewise conspicuous in the children. There is no more frequent cause, says Dr. Hillier,--whose authority in such matters none will dispute,--of rickets than this. Puny, sickly, short-lived offspring follows over-production. Worse than this, the carefully compiled statistics of Scotland show that such children are peculiarly liable to idiocy. Adding to an already excessive number, they come to over-burden a mother already overwhelmed with progeny. They cannot receive at her hands the attention they require. Weakly herself, she brings forth weakly infants. 'Thus,' concludes Dr. Duncan, 'are the accumulated evils of an excessive family manifest.' Apart from these considerations, there are certain social relations which have been thought by some to advise small families. When either parent suffers from a disease which is transmissible, and wishes to avoid inflicting misery on an unborn generation, it has been urged that they should avoid children. Such diseases not unfrequently manifest themselves after marriage, which is answer enough to the objection that if they did not wish children they should not marry. There are also women to whom pregnancy is a nine months' torture, and others to whom it is nearly certain to prove fatal. Such a condition cannot be discovered before marriage, and therefore cannot be provided against by a single life. Can such women be asked to immolate themselves? It is strange, says that distinguished writer, John Stuart Mill, that intemperance in drink, or in any other appetite, should be condemned so readily, but that incontinence in this respect should always meet not only with indulgence but praise. 'Little improvement' he adds, 'can be expected in morality until the producing too large families is regarded with the same feeling as drunkenness, or any other physical excess.' A well-known medical writer, Dr. Drysdale, in commenting on these words, adds: 'In this error, if error it be, I also humbly share.' 'When dangerous prejudices,' says Sismondi, the learned historian of southern Europe, 'have not become accredited, when our true duties towards those to whom we give life are not obscured in the name of a sacred authority, no married man will have more children than he can bring up properly.'