J52Section II.C. B. Davenport.
uncle and niece, or of aunt and nephew, are forbidden. When it comes to
the mating of cousins, legislators have been in much greater doubt. About
a third of the States forbid such marriages, and these are chiefly in the
western, or more recently settled, territory. In most European States, I am
informed, no legal limitation to the marriage of cousins exists
Let us now consider in how far there is a biological justification for these
laws. I know that there are those who hold that the mating even of brother
and sister for generations may result in offspring without blemish. We are
referred to the Incas of Peru, about whom we know little in detail, and to
the Ptolomies, of whom we know a little more, but not as much as a well-
trained field worker of the Eugenics Record Office would discover in two or
three days. The last Cleopatra, the daughter of a brother and sister, is
pointed out to us as the great argument against the evil effects of incestuous
marriages. That she was the crowning flower of a beautiful race may be
admitted, but is there any doubt that, were she living to-day, she would be
placed in the manic-depressive ward of a hospital for the insane, with
further history of paranoia and erotomania ? But we, too, have histories of
incest, brought in by our field workers; histories of families brought up,
not in palaces, but in hovels in the woods. For example, a criminalistic
man had, by an unknown woman, a number of boys and girls. One of the
boys, who was a drunken, feeble-minded fellow with criminalistic tendencies,
has had by his own sister a daughter who is a drunken epileptic. This
daughter by her own father has had four children of whom one is epileptic,
two are imbecile, and the fourth was an encephalic monster who died at
birth. I would undertake to produce two cases of this general sort for each
case that may be offered of the “ romantic,” “ vivacious ” product of a
brother and sister mating. And can we doubt that a sober minded people
have been impressed by such cases as I have cited, have stored them up in
their memory as part of experience, and have crystallized that experience in
laws against incest?
And how about the marriage of first cousins? Are the laws that forbid
such marriages justifiable? Our modern knowledge of heredity leads to the
conclusion that cousin marriages (like the marriage of sibs, possibly) is not
injurious per se, but because such marriages enhance the probability that the
same defect shall inhere in each of the two germ-oells that unite to start
the development of the child. While the prohibition of cousin marriages
is doubtless a rough eugenic measure, it were better if the prohibition were
qualified somewhat as follows: “ The marriage of cousins is forbidden
when in the parental fraternity that is common to both, there is a case of
inability to learn at school, of dementia precox or manic depressive insanity
in any of their forms, of epilepsy, of congenital deafness, of albinism, or
of cleft palate/’ Such a restriction in the application of the law might
well increase the difficulty of administering it, but the law would be
rendered more significant and less unjust.
