Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: outlines of the three different groups of individuals who enter the world hampered and stunted under the weight of their native inheritance. They are born under a bondage, which places them outside the ranks of freeborn individuals. It is what Shakespeare expresses in these hard words: Cowards father cowards, and base things sire base; Nature hath meal and bran; contempt and grace. Indeed, no mercy is to be hoped for from Nature. I am now coming to a closer investigation of the last form of degeneration which my material allows me to treat of, viz: the uratic degeneration. This stands in a distinctly different relation to the family, and to life in general, from the other three groups, seeing that it does not crop up as the result of some process of disease or some other foreign factor, which forcibly enters the human organism and drives it and its progeny away from the straight track, but is only the regular manifestation of a fundamental law of nature, which means that, when the family has attained to its full development and maturity, it weakensand collapses, dwindles away, and dies. It is consequently not here a question of a violent irruption during the still immature stage, but of the natural end, when the goal has been reached and the fruit is ripe. When a stream rushes forward through its bed and follows the fixed course which leads it towards its destination, it throws out sideways, along the shore, a weaker counter current, which, with a lightly rippled surface, nestles nicely and playfully up against the edge of the great main current. This phenomenon is called the backwater. The same is the case with the degeneration, which is likewise, during the ever-progressing course of the great current which marks the infinite evolution of human life, thrown back …