Note 12 — IV Hecuba Feminist Mothers

Professor MacBride, dealing recently with the “Inheritance of Defect” (Daily Telegraph, January 8, 1925) said: “The question of questions was whether the failure of the lowest strata of society was due to their surroundings or to their inborn characters. Such questions must be ultimately decided by experiment; and proper experimental work could only be done with animals; we were not entitled to make corpora vilia of our fellow human beings. For this reason he would direct attention to the common goldfish, whose weird monstrosities were all originally due to the starvation of the eggs with respect to light and air in the earliest stages of development. The result of this starvation was to weaken the developmental power and to produce a disharmonious arrest of growth of various organs. Similar arrests of growth occurred in human beings, and were the causes of mental and bodily defects. Their original cause, however, must be sought in the starvation and poisoning of the blood of the mother, but, once started, they were hereditary.”