but slowly, he remains only as a curious and useless thing, picturesque to an artistic eye; but he is ill adapted to his circumstances, and certain sooner or later to vanish.

THE CAGOTS.

The various names of Cagots, Agots, Capots, Gahets, and Caqueux, are given to races which subsisted down to the present century in Guyenne, Gascony, and Béarn, on the northern side of the Pyrenees, in Navarre and Guipuzcoa, and even in Maine and Brittany. They formed a population apart, separated from the other inhabitants by the aversion with which it was regarded. Popular tradition, confounded these people with lepers. It was said that they might be distinguished by their dull-gray eyes, and by the shortness of the lobe of the ear. 'They are,' says an author of the 16th century, 'comely men, industrious, skilful mechanics; but in their countenances and in their acts you always detect something that makes them worthy of all the abhorrence wherewith they are universally regarded. Furthermore, be they as comely as they may, they have all, men and women alike, a stinking breath, and when you come near one of them you experience a certain unpleasant odour emanating from their flesh, as though some curse descending from father to son had fallen upon this miserable race of men.'

Though, like the population amid which they lived, they were Catholics, still they were not allowed to mix with their coreligionists. Their hovels stood at some little distance outside the villages; they could enter the parish church only through a narrow doorway exclusively reserved for them; they took the holy water from a special stoup, or received it from the point of a stick; and in the church they had a corner where they were obliged to

1 During the Reign of Terror there were yet to be found many of the Caqueux in Finistère. M. Francisque Michel states that in a commune of the canton of Accous, arrondissement of Oléron, a Cagot was, about the year 1817, nominated for maire of the commune, to the great scandal of the people of the place. Protests were sent in from all sides to the préfet, but he did not heed them. Still the complaints did not cease, they continued to be made till 1830, when the electors forced the maire to retire into his former privacy. -Histoire des Races Maudites, i. 127.

keep apart from the rest of the faithful.

Down to the end of the 17th century they were required by the legislation then in force to wear a distinctive mark, called 'the goose's foot,' or 'the duck's foot' (pied d'oie, pied de canard) in the decrees of the parliaments of Navarre and of Bordeaux.

rare.

Of course these outcasts intermarried, as a general rule, and marriages between Cagot families held to be 'pure' were very Hence this race remained under much the same conditions as the Jews-in a state highly favourable to hereditary transmission. It is to be observed that many of those who have spoken of these Cagots from personal observation, and particularly the physicians of the 16th and 17th century, whose remarks are given in M. Michel's work, noticed the fact of heredity. On the other hand, the same author tells us that a modern writer says, 'I distrust external signs as means of distinguishing Cagots from people of other races.' Perhaps these opinions might be reconciled, if we observe that the Cagots do not appear to have been a race strictly distinct, like the Jews and the Gypsies. While the origin of the last-named races is known, that of the Cagots is extremely obscure. All sorts of conjectures have been made, ranging from the one which would have them to be the descendants of a servant of the prophet Elijah, down to that which sees in them a remnant of the Goths.1 If, then, between the Cagots and the surrounding population there were no diversity of race, all external differences would gradually disappear under the influence of identical conditions.

Still, during their pariah period the Cagots would have been a curious object of study from the standpoint of psychological and moral heredity. But unfortunately the data are totally wanting. We only know that in Guyenne and in Gascony they were all coopers or carpenters; and that in Brittany they were all ropemakers; and were considered very expert in their trade. But this fact seems to us to be far less the result of heredity than of the caste-rule to which they were subjected. They were accused of being presumptuous, arrogant, braggart-defects which may be explained as well by the attitude of permanent hostility in which

1 Races Maudites, i. 266.

they stood with regard to all other men, as by the organic transmission of quality. There is one simple fact, insignificant enough in itself, respecting an hereditary taste and talent for music: 'Navarreins has seen the Campagnets hand down through three or four generations a highly prized violin. No holiday was happily spent where the violin or the flute of the Campagnets did not contribute to the mirth.'1

CHAPTER IX.

MORBID PSYCHOLOGICAL HEREDITY.

I.

AT the commencement of this work, in the introduction devoted to physiological heredity, we showed briefly that diseases are transmissible, like all the characteristics of the external or internal structure, and all the various modes of the organization in a normal state. The same question now arises in the psychological order. Are the modes of mental life transmissible under their morbid, as they are under their normal form? Does the study of mental diseases contribute its quota of facts in favour of heredity? The answer must be in the affirmative. The transmission of all kinds of psychological anomalies-whether of passions and crimes, of which we have already spoken, or of hallucinations and insanity, of which we are next to speak-is so frequent, and evidenced by such striking facts, that the most inattentive observers have been struck by it, and that morbid psychological heredity is admitted even by those who have no suspicion that this is only one aspect of a law which is far more general.

In considering hereafter the direct causes of mental heredity, we shall endeavour to establish this important proposition: that in man, to every psychological state whatsoever, corresponds a determinate physiological state, and vice versa. Here this question is presented incidentally, for it has been much debated whether mental diseases have or have not an organic cause.

1 Ibid. i. 41.

If we restrict ourselves to palpable, visible, demonstrated, and accepted facts, we meet with two sorts of cases: those in which disorders of the intellect have corresponding to them evident changes of the tissue of the nerve-centres, and those in which the brain presents no appreciable degeneration.

Taking their stand on facts of the second of these categories, some writers on insanity, of whom the most celebrated is Leuret, have held that insanity may proceed from purely psychological causes. 'Physiology,' says he, 'pathology, acquaintance with the facts and the laws of thought and of passion, clinical and microscopic observations, therapeutical experiments-all concur to negative the absolute proposition that insanity always and necessarily has its rise in an affection of the organs. While everything contributes to bestow the character of evidence upon the following definition of insanity: Insanity consists in the aberration of the understanding . . . and the causes that produce it mostly belong to an order of phenomena that have nothing to do with the laws of matter.' Notwithstanding these categorical affirmations, Leuret's view finds daily fewer adherents. The reason of this is, that it really rests only on our ignorance and impotence. It simply affirms that in many cases there exists no physical cause, since we discern none. But beyond the limits that cannot be passed by the microscope, there exist phenomena which, though inappreciable to our senses, are nevertheless material. Electricity, magnetism, and all the various physical and chemical agencies, produce in our inmost organs molecular changes which elude our methods of investigation, but of which the consequences may be fatal. Moreover, the idea of a mental disease independent of all organic cause is a theory so unintelligible that the Spiritualists themselves have rejected it, and it is now generally admitted that the cause of madness is always to be found in a diseased state of the organs: insanity, like other maladies, is a disease physical in its cause, though mental as regards most of its symptoms.

1

1 See Lemoine, L'Aliené, p. 105—137. The hypothesis of purely psychological causes of insanity led Heinroth to pen the following absurdities which are worth quoting:—

'Insanity is the loss of moral freedom; it never depends on a physical cause;

Since the direct cause of insanity is some morbid affection of the nervous system, and as every part of the organism is transmissible, clearly the heredity of mental affections is the rule. It makes little difference whether we regard thought as simply a function of the nervous system, or the nervous system as a simple condition of thought. Our experimental psychology, which deals only with facts, remands to metaphysics all researches into first causes. The metamorphoses of heredity are still more perplexing. Nervous disorders are often transformed in their transmission. Convulsions in the progenitors may change to hysteria or to epilepsy in the descendants. A case is cited where hyperesthesia in the father branched out in the grandchildren into the various forms of monomania, mania, hypochondria, hysteria, epilepsy, convulsions, spasms. Facts of this kind are very numerous. To confine ourselves to psychological metamorphoses, nothing is more frequent than to see simple insanity become suicidal mania, or suicidal mania become simple insanity, alcoholism, or hypochondria. 'A goldsmith, who had been cured of a first attack of insanity, caused by the revolution of 1789, took poison; later, his eldest daughter was seized with an attack of mania, passing into dementia. One of her brothers stabbed himself in the stomach with a knife. A second brother gave himself up to drunkenness, and ended his career by dying in the streets. A third, owing to domestic annoyances, refused all food, and died of anæmia. Another daughter, a woman of most capricious temper, married, and had a son and daughter: the former died insane and epileptic; the latter lost her mind during her lying in, became hypochondriac, and wished to starve herself to death. Two children of this same woman died of brain fever, and a third would never take the breast.' 1 This is one of the most instructive cases we have.

it is not a disease of the body, but a disease of the mind, a sin. It neither is, nor can be hereditary, because the thinking ego, the soul, is not hereditary. What is transmissible by way of generation is temperament and constitution, and against these he must react whose parents were insane, if he would not himself become lunatic. The man who, during his whole life, has before his eyes and in his heart the image of God, need never fear that he will lose his wits,' etc.

1 Piorry, De l'Hérédité dans les Maladies, p. 169. Pathology of Mind, 244–256.

See also Maudsley,