III.

If from propensities which, in their origin at least, are purely physical, we pass to the consideration of more complex passions, independent, or rather seemingly so, of the organism-for example, gambling, avarice, theft, and murder-we shall find these also subject to the law of heredity.

The passion for play often attains such a pitch of madness as to be a form of insanity, and, like it, transmissible. 'A lady of my acquaintance,' says Da Gama Machado, and who possessed a large fortune, had a passion for gambling, and passed whole nights at play. She died young, of pulmonary disease. Her eldest son, who was very like his mother, had the same passion for play. He, too, like his mother, died of consumption, and at about the same age. His daughter, who resembled him, inherited the same taste, and died young."1

Avarice produces the same consequences. 'In several instances,' says Maudsley,2 in his Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, ‘in which the father has toiled upwards from poverty to vast wealth, with the aim and hope of founding a family, I have witnessed the results in a mental and physical and mental degeneracy, which has sometimes gone as far as the extinction of the family in the third or fourth generation. When the evil is not so extreme as madness or ruinous vice, the savour of a mother's influence having been present, it may still be manifest in an instinctive cunning and duplicity, and an extreme selfishness of nature—a nature not having the capacity of a true moral conception or altruistic feeling. Whatever opinion other experimental observers may hold, I cannot but think that the extreme passion for getting rich, absorbing the whole energies of a life, does predispose to mental degeneration in the offspring,—either to moral defect, or to intellectual and moral deficiency, or to outbreaks of positive insanity under the conditions of life.'

The heredity of the tendency to thieving is so generally admitted that it would be superfluous to bring together here facts which abound in every record of judicial proceedings. One, but that decisive, may be cited from Dr. Despine's Psychologie Naturelle, the genealogy of the Chrétien family.

1 Da Gama Machado, p. 142.

2 Maudsley, p. 234.

Jean Chrétien, the common ancestor, had three sons-Pierre, Thomas, and Jean-Baptiste. 1. Pierre had a son, Jean-François, who was condemned for life to hard labour for robbery and murder. 2. Thomas had two sons: (1) François, condemned to hard labour (travaux forcés) for murder, and (2) Martin, condemned to death for murder. Martin's son died in Cayenne, whither he had been transported for robbery. 3. Jean-Baptiste had a son, Jean-François, whose wife was Marie Tauré (belonging to a family of incendiaries). This Jean-François had seven children (1) Jean-François, found guilty of several robberies, died in prison; (2) Benoist, fell off a roof which he had scaled, and was killed; (3) X——, nicknamed Clain, found guilty of several robberies, died at the age of twenty-five; (4) Marie Reine, died in prison, whither she had been sent for theft; (5) Marie-Rose, same fate, same deeds; (6) Victor, now in jail for theft; (7) Victorine, married one Lemaire: their son was condemned to death for murder and robbery.1

We have given this instance because it cuts short all explanations drawn from the influence of education and example. Doubtless it is difficult in many cases to determine what is due to education, and what to nature; and the children of thieves are not very likely to be trained to honesty by their parents; but still nature is always the stronger agency. Sundry authors, and among them Gall, have given instances of a disposition to thieving, where any parental influence was impossible. He gives one instance still more curious that of two conflicting heredities: one good, from the mother, and one bad, from the father.

In 1845, the Cour d'Assises of La Seine condemned to severe and degrading penalties three out of the five members of a family of thieves. The father of this family had not found in his children the dispositions he desired. He had been compelled to use compulsion with his wife and his two eldest children, but they, to the last, refused to obey him. His eldest daughter, on the other hand, trod instinctively in her father's steps, and was passionate and

1 Despine, tome ii. p. 410.

Several facts of a like kind may be found in this work. Observe the tendency of such families to unite, thus conferring the hereditary transmission. See also Lucas, i. p. 480, seq.

violent like him. She took after her father, the rest of the children after their mother.

We may apply to the instinct for murder what we have just said of thieving. Instances of hereditary transmission are equally conclusive and equally numerous. We have already seen the heredity of homicide added, in a portion of a family, to the heredity of theft; and it is needless to cite cases that may be found in abundance on all sides.1 Here, however, are two instances, in which the circumstances of the crime remove all doubt as to its hereditary transmission.

In the Annales Médico-Psychologiques for 1853 we read that two girls, Adèle and Lucie H- aged thirteen and seventeen, were bound apprentices at Paris. Adèle was of remarkably gentle manners, and industrious; but Lucie was of an unsociable disposition, and disagreeable to her mistress and her companions. Enraged at her state of isolation, she endeavoured by threats and caresses to persuade her sister to murder their mistress. As Adèle refused, Lucie passed a stay-lace round her neck, intending to strangle her. Adèle cried out, and the mistress came to the spot. Lucie, disappointed in her hope of an accomplice, resolved to take her vengeance herself. She collected bits of glass and ground them to a powder; this she mixed with her mistress's dinner. The latter for several days suffered internal pain, the cause of which was unknown, until she discovered the pounded glass in Lucie's hands. The girl was arrested, but on her trial it was proved that her grandfather had, during his life, made many attempts at murder, and at last strangled his wife. His children never showed the least symptoms of homicidal mania; it reappeared, as we have seen, in the second generation.

In all cases where hereditary transmission takes the form of atavism, it is clear that the influence of education has no weight. The same may be said of all precocious homicidal acts, and of those committed out of frivolous motives, like the following:

A boy of fourteen, one of a family in bad repute, went, armed with his bow, to a neighbouring village feast. He met on the way a little girl of six, who had in her hand thirty sous to buy bread,

1 See Lucas, i. 504, 520; Despine, ii. 281, 283; Mireau, Psychologie Morbide, 319, 321.

knocked her down, strangled her, threw her body into a field at a distance from the road, took the thirty sous, and went on to the village feast to spend the money and enjoy himself.

The innate, incurable taste for a vagabond life shown so strikingly in inferior races, and in the gypsies, is also unquestionably a consequence of heredity. These facts will be considered from the social standpoint in the fourth part of this work.

The conclusion, perhaps unexpected, to which we are led by all the foregoing arguments, is this—that insanity very much resembles passion; and this, statement is to be taken in the strict sense of the words. The common opinion readily enough admits that both obscure the intellect and paralyze the will, but is loth to admit that a violent passion is, in its generating causes, identical with insanity. When, however, we read judicial records, and especially medical annals, in search of facts to show the heredity of homicide, theft, or alcoholism, then, side by side, with the somewhat homogeneous facts wherein we see the passions of ancestors transmitted in identical form to descendants, we find other heterogeneous facts, in which what is passion in the former becomes insanity in the latter, and vice versa. Such facts are very numerous. We have not cited any of these, though they are excellent instances of heredity. As we restrict ourselves to facts that are absolutely incontestable, we have put aside from consideration the whole question of heredity by metamorphosis.

We do not maintain that every violent passion or every crime is only a variety of insanity, but only that in many cases the conditions which produce both are identical. Nothing in Nature is limited and isolated: all things are connected together by intermediate links, which attentive observation sooner or later discovers, where, at first glance, they were not even suspected. It were to be wished, in the interest of science, that inquiries should be made as to the progenitors of criminals for at least two or three generations. This would be an excellent means of demonstrating the kinship which exists between those cerebral infirmities which produce the psychic anomalies leading to crime, and the pathological affections of the nerve centres, particularly the brain. The fact, demonstrated by Drs. Ferrus and Lélut, that insanity is much more frequent among criminals than other persons, goes far to

prove that crime and insanity are closely connected.'1 The number of criminals whose ancestors have given signs of insanity is very great. Verger, the assassin of the Archbishop of Paris, was of this number. His mother and one of his brothers perished, prior to his crime, the victims of suicidal mania.

Dr. Bruce Thompson, in his recent work on The Hereditary Nature of Crime, adopts this conclusion, and supports it by figures. Of 5,432 prisoners, he found 673 whose mental state appeared to him to be unsound, though, according to the general opinion, they were not subjects for a lunatic asylum. Out of 904 convicts in prison at Perth, 440 were recommitted, thus showing the fatal power of the passions. In a house of detention there were 109 prisoners belonging to only 50 families; among them were eight members of one family, and several families were represented by two or three members.

It is beyond our purpose to inquire to what extent passion shares in the fatal character of insanity, or to ascertain the practical consequences of this. The argument simply shows that (1) passions which are inexplicable, so long as they are studied in the isolated individual, find their explanation so soon as we have studied them in their metamorphoses through generations, and brought them under the great law of heredity; (2) that passion is so near insanity that the two forms of heredity are really one: so that the preceding section is, as it were, a chapter, detached and in advance, on morbid heredity.

1

CHAPTER VII.

HEREDITY OF THE WILL.

I.

THE title given to this chapter is hardly exact, and is only selected for want of a better. Yet it seems to us that in the statesmen and great soldiers of whom we are about to speak, the will must be regarded as the dominant faculty. They must, no

1 Despine, Psychologie Naturelle, ii. 983.