enough has long ago been written and said to sufficiently educate all well-informed persons in a knowledge of their pernicious character, yet it is not by any means rare to witness intermarriage within the second and third degrees, and the products of such connections are proverbially feeble and delicate. The difficulty of "raising" such children is but too well known to all physicians of any experience. In nearly all civilized countries civil legislation, as well as religious laws, have fixed the degrees of consanguinity, within which they refuse to sanction marriages. This pro- hibition is based upon the following grave considerations :
1. That by causing the blood to "return into its source" the race is degenerated.
2. That the peace of families, which constitute the foun- dation of society, is invaded, by destroying the respect which children owe to their superiors, and that often the most shameful abuse of authority would be practiced to subserve a criminal passion.
But it is not only marriages within the prohibited degrees which should be proscribed. Multiplied unions between the same families are not less disastrous, in that they all tend to the premature extinction of races. This fact has been clearly demonstrated in a remarkable work by De Chateauneuf, upon "The Duration of Noble Families in France." This learned statistician has proved that nearly all the old families of a portion of Europe have long since ceased to exist. His observations embrace France, Italy, England, and Spain. In Germany, Holland, and Switzer- land the male descendants of William Tell have been extinct for nearly two centuries. If some grand names have escaped the general destruction, it has been by the aid of subterfuges of every sort, such as the infinite num- ber of substitutions, the transmission of names by women
