external resemblances.
Original defects and deformities are often transmitted, such as blindness, deafness, imbecility, idiocy, hare-lip, hernias, etc. All authors cite examples of individuals with one or more supernumerary fingers and toes, from father to eon, for generations.13 Burdach tells of a father and son who had twelve fingers and as many toes. Van Derbach mentions a Spanish family, forty members of which had an extra number of fingers. Science teems with similar facts.
The predisposition to diseases is a sad and last proof of the bond which unites the successive generations of the same family. The best manner of correcting morbid hereditary predispositions, such as consumption, gout, cancer, scrofula, etc., is the crossing of races and temperaments, in order to establish a sort of compensation between the negative qualities of one organism, and the excess, in an opposite sense, of the other, whence results, in the last analysis, a profitable proportion for the offspring.
Dr. Serrurier, of Paris, who has devoted a life-time to the elucidation of this question, advises: "Let every one consult his physician in this matter, and be not afraid to learn the truth from his lips; encourage him, even, to explain himself categorically. Such is the duty of fathers and mothers. It is an act of humanity which every family should perform. The physician, on his part, from the importance of his ministry, ought to act with all the sincerity of his conscience, and to place himself as an impartial judge between the families, rejecting those alliances of which the consequences can be only fatal to one or both of the parties."
The transmission of disease to offspring is not the sole danger to be apprehended from incompatible marriages. Besides those contagious diseases which are so readily
