OUR knowledge of the large group of degenerative nervous affections, hereditary or familial as they often are, has scarcely progressed beyond the stage of mere description. In no class of (lisease, perhaps, has study of morbid anatomy been pushed to more barren limits or failed more signally to furnish a clue to treatment than in this, where, commonly enough, to become the victims the subjects have only to be born of the same parents and reach the age marked out by fate. Here, if anywhere, lies

more »

... a problem for preventive medicine; if we knew what gives to the parents " le triste privilege de procreer de tels enfants " we might perhaps be able to neutralize the mischief at its source. Simple diagnosis of a case of pseudohypertrophic muscular paralysis, mere addition to the pathological records of Friedreich's disease, seems nothing less than futile as long as tracing the stock and investigating the progeny is ignored, or the question of (letermining how germ-plasm and antenatal development are warped remains unsolved. It has been asserted with some degree of truth that we know less of the blood lines of our human stock than we do of our cattle. In the 17th century three brothers sailed from England to America, and it appeared themi to matter less than nothing that one of the parents suffered from hereditary chorea; but had they on that account been refused permission to land, America, in the words of Charles B. Davenport, " would have lost two leading educators, a surgeon or two, two or three State assembly men, and several iministers, and-900 cases of one of the most dreadful diseases that