WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7, 1912.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 7 August 1912, Page 2

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7, 1912.

THE HEREDITARY TAINT. Heredity is playing so important a part in the national life of the present decade that certain sceptics who at one period of their lives were inclined to disbeleive in hereditary characteristic and disease, have in many instances been found to be open to conviction, with the inevitable

result that not a few are now taking up the subject as a study ; moreover, subsequent to careful analysis of facts, will probably be astounded at the revelations in consequence. To the majority of people it is nothing extraordinary to suggest that the accomplishment of playing on the pianoforte has been inherited from one's mother simply because she was a fine pianiste as perhaps her maternal parent was likewise in her day. But, when it is asserted that the vicous temper revealed in a boy or a girl is merely a further stage of development in the course hereditary evolution, this logical deduction is deemed by a sensitive mother or a stern father to be going beyond the limits of a reasonable trend of thought. Even beauty, though very often only skin deep, is considered hereditary, inasmuch that the race has been endowed with the contour of beautiful features for hundreds of years. Yet, when it is stated that heredity is, in this twentieth century of advanced scientific and medical research, responsible for numberless forms of degeneracy to which the flesh is heir, we are confronted with a truth widely acknowledged by the greatest living physicians and scientists of to-day. If we be capable of inheriting the germ of genius in an abnormal degree, why then not other traits as well? The problem is not so obtruse or conflicting to solve as it would seem to pourtray itself. Disease is freely admitted to be hereditary, and, as the beast of the field to the highest born in the land, the dread germs of tuberculosis, cancer, and other malignant scourges of humanity that have unquestionably been breeding through many generations, are- rife in thousands of children. Again, we have the modern criminologist expounding the theory that criminality is, in scores of cases, the outcome of hereditary taint. For instance,' assuming a man were a kleptomaniac, it is/ quite within the bounds of possibility that his progeny might, under conditions of temptation, take to a career of crime in which deliberate acts of theft would figure largely. In the police records of this Dominion, alone, there is ample evidence to prove conclusively that children born of criminal parents are supersensitive to crime —predestined, we might almost say, to develop hereditary taint. And, further, who will deny that the traces of insanity are not often manifest in families whose members have in-ter-married? We think that the subject of heredity is one worthy of a great deal more earnest consideration than is shown to it by the people of New Zealand and other countries, for in the study of this question of hereditary traits there is presented a serious conception of thought embodying a higher purpose and resolve. It is to this end that we must look for a remedy.