Intermarriage, or, How and why beauty, health and intellect result from certain unions, and deformity, disease and insanity from others / by Alexander Walker.

  • Walker, Alexander
Date:
1897
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Intermarriage, or, How and why beauty, health and intellect result from certain unions, and deformity, disease and insanity from others / by Alexander Walker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of M. de Langeais, incapable of the duties of marriage with his own wife, being very fruitful with another lady better suited to him. Thus, while in iove, similarity is required as to the variety of species and as to age, difference is looked for in all other respects, and is necessary not only to its existence, but to all its best effects. Hence the practical observation has been made tiiat, if persons of similar temperament are joined together, as Voltaire and Madame de Chatelet, who could neither quit nor endure each other long, this similitude both produces a series of quarrels, and becomes a remarkable cause of sterility. The beneficial tendencv of this love of difference does not %> terminate here: it leads to those slight crosses in intermarriage between persons of different organisation, which are as essential to the improvement of the races of men as we have found them to be to those of animals. It is the operation of this principle, an operation which may be morally less desirable, that, acting most powerfully when the passion of love is strongest and the system most vigorous, seeks to exhaust itself in that varietv which is to be found even in a succession of objects. Indeed, every moral error or imprudence of this kind originates in a natural law. SECTION II. STATE OF MARRIAGE. Marriage is the result of the preference which has just been described ; and in its first act, the neglect of care, management, and patience may produce serious injury. In general, danger is less a few days after the catamenia, in other respects the proper period. Dr. Plazoni describes the case of a young woman in whom the vulvo-uterine canal was ruptured ; and Diemerbroek states that two young Dutch women died of hemorrhage.