Some writers have doubted whether those complex mental attributes, on which genius and talent depend, are inherited, even when both parents are thus endowed. But he who will read Mr. Galton's able paper[11] on hereditary talent will have his doubts allayed.
Unfortunately it matters not, as far as inheritance is concerned, how injurious a quality or structure may be if compatible with life. No one can read the many treatises[12] on hereditary disease and doubt this. The ancients were strongly of this opinion, or, as Ranchin expresses it, _Omnes Græci, Arabes, et Latini in eo consentiunt_. A long catalogue could be given of all sorts of inherited malformations and of predisposition to various diseases. With gout, fifty per cent. of the cases observed in hospital practice are, according to Dr. Garrod, inherited, and a greater percentage in private practice. Every one knows how often insanity runs in families, and some of the cases given by Mr. Sedgwick are awful,--as of a surgeon, whose brother, father, and four paternal uncles were all insane, the latter dying by suicide; of a Jew, whose father, mother, and six brothers and sisters were all mad; and in some other cases several members of the same family, during three or four successive generations, have committed suicide. Striking instances { 8} have been recorded of epilepsy, consumption, asthma, stone in the bladder, cancer, profuse bleeding from the slightest injuries, of the mother not giving milk, and of bad parturition being inherited. In this latter respect I may mention an odd case given by a good observer,[13] in which the fault lay in the offspring, and not in the mother: in a part of Yorkshire the farmers continued to select cattle with large hind-quarters, until they made a strain called "Dutch-buttocked," and "the monstrous size of the buttocks of the calf was frequently fatal to the cow, and numbers of cows were annually lost in calving."
Instead of giving numerous details on various inherited malformations and diseases, I will confine myself to one organ, that which is the most complex, delicate, and probably best-known in the human frame, namely, the eye, with its accessory parts. To begin with the latter: I have heard of a family in which parents and children were affected by drooping eyelids, in so peculiar a manner, that they could not see without throwing their heads backwards; and Sir A. Carlisle[14] specifies a pendulous fold to the eyelids as inherited. "In a family," says Sir H. Holland,[15] "where the father had a singular elongation of the upper eyelid, seven or eight children were born with the same deformity; two or three other children having it not." Many persons, as I year from Mr. Paget, have two or three of the hairs in their eyebrows (apparently corresponding with the vibrissæ of the lower animals) much longer than the others; and even so trifling a peculiarity as this certainly runs in families.