IOSection I.D. F. Weeks
universal civilisation, should contemplate the preservation of its own ethnic
type. Differentiation amongst peoples is an indispensable factor in human
progress. The science of eugenics should not look for the realisation of a uniform
type of man, but vary its aims and methods according to the natural
differentiation of races and nations, taking account of ethnic psychology
equally with ethnic somatology.
The humanity of the future will be physically and mentally superior
to the existing humanity, but the amelioration of the species ought not to aim
at the equality of races and populations. These races and populations
ought not to lose their acquisition of particular adaptations to different
conditions of existence.
A science of universal or common eugenics should allow a eugenic
ethnology to exist, which should indicate and facilitate for each race or
nation the defence and propagation of its own physical type and its own
mentality. The most vigorous and dominant races will always be those
which know how to create and preserve in sexual unions their characteristics
of structure and culture.
THE INHERITANCE OF EPILEPSY.
(Abstract.)
By David Fairchild Weeks, M.D.,
Medical Superintendent and Executive Officer, the New Jersey State
Village for Epileptics at Skillman, U.S.A.
In this paper the writer has endeavoured to learn what laws, if any,
epilepsy follows in its return to successive generations, and the relation it
bears to alcoholism, migraine, paralysis, and other symptoms of lack of
neural strength.
The data used in the study was analysed according to the Mendelian
method which assumes that the inheritance of any character is not from
the parents, grandparents, etc., but from the germ plasm out of which every
fraternity and its parents and other relatives have arisen. If the soma
possesses the trait of the recessive to normality sort, it lacks in its germ
plasm the determiner upon which the normal development depends, and this
condition is called nulliplex. If the soma possesses the trait of the
dominent to normality sort, the determiner was derived from both parents
and is double in the germ plasm, or normal, all of the germ cells have the
determiner; or else it came from one parent only, is single in the germ
