Honesty demands, therefore, that consanguineous marriage be not credited
with results for which the consanguineous element is in no wise
responsible. The prevailing habit of picking out a community or a strain
where consanguineous marriage and defects are associated and loudly
declaring the one to be the cause of the other, is evidence of the lack
of scientific thought that is all too common.
Most of the studies of these isolated communities where intermarriage
has taken place, illustrate the same point. C. B. Davenport, for example,
quotes[94] an anonymous correspondent from the island of Bermuda, which
"shows the usual consequence of island life." He writes: "In some of the
parishes (Somerset and Paget chiefly) there has been much intermarriage,
not only with cousins but with double first cousins in several cases.
Intermarriage has chiefly caused weakness of character leading to drink,
not lack of brains or a certain amount of physical strength, but a very
inert and lazy disposition."
It is difficult to believe that anyone who has lived in the tropics
could have written this except as a practical joke. Those who have
resided in the warmer parts of the world know, by observation if not by
experience, that a "weakness of character leading to drink" and "an
inert and lazy disposition" are by no means the prerogatives of the
inbred.
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