A pathological and philosophical essay on hereditary diseases, with an appendix on intermarriage and the inheritance of the tendency to moral depravities and crimes / by Julius Henry Steinau.

  • Steinau, Julius Henry.
Date:
1843
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A pathological and philosophical essay on hereditary diseases, with an appendix on intermarriage and the inheritance of the tendency to moral depravities and crimes / by Julius Henry Steinau. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

    56/72 (page 40)
    It may, however, be stated, as the result of extensive inquiry amongst different individuals who have had ample opportunity for observation, which they made without refei’ence to the question under consideration, that in different parts of the globe, and in different varieties of mankind, those groups or classes which furnish the best specimens of human beings are precisely those in which mixed marriages had been habitually excluded, whilst intermarriage within very narrow limits had prevailed. On the testimony of an individual who had long I'esided on the Barbary Coast, there is a remarkable contrast be- tween the mixed inhabitants of maritime towns and the natives of the villages in the interior, who belong to a stock unmixed from time immemorial. Whilst these ex- hibited the finest specimens of the human figure, with corresponding intelligence; the people on the coast were obviously degenerated. Another gentleman who had resided and travelled in the East Indies, when questioned as to the varieties of man which had fallen under his observation, pointed out, as the finest examples, the Mahometan inhabitants of a particular district: and on further inquiry, it appeared that these people had long strictly abstained from all in- termarriage with other people — a circumstance which could scarcely fail to have promoted those close family intermarriages which the laws and usages of the disciples of Mahomet have sanctioned. It is well known, that in the small islands scattered over the Pacific Ocean—in which, from physical character, lan- guage, and traditions, it is evident that the inhabitants are mainly and essentially composed of one variety of man, viz. the Polynesian branch of the Malay—’the Chiefs in each island compose a distinguished class of the same people, the families of Chiefs being constantly kept up by marriages within its limits. As political differences tend