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MISCELLANEOUS. 203
between cousins, but they are usually unfortunate.
This depends, however, on their similarity. Where
two cousins evidently partake strongly of different
stocks, they may have a genuine love and a true mar
riage.
If we accept the account of the human race having
sprung from a single pair, there was a necessity for in
cest between brothers and sisters of the second, and
and cousins, uncles and nieces, or nephew and aunts, in
the succeeding. Even Abraham, the chosen of God,
from whom the Hebrew nation was descended, had his
half-sister for his wife ; and Lot was the father of the
progenitors of two nations, by his own daughters. The
sexual commerce of near relations is a crime against
society with respect to offspring, and is so far subject
to law. I can see no physiological reason, however,
why a man may not marry his wife's sister, or a woman
her husband's brother. The real bar to love and union
is a similarity, accidentally existing,
hereditary transmission.
HERMAPHRODISM.
or the result of
There is no such thing as a full double sexual devel
—
no opment person with both testicles and ovaries,
penis, vagina, and uterus, all capable of performing
their proper functions. But there is sometimes a won
derful mixture of the elements of both sexes, accom
panied with more or less organic correspondence.
I knew, once, such a specimen of imperfect her-
maphrodism. It was a woman, with an approach to
masculine development, in an enormous clitoris, much
like a penis. She was narrow at the hips, flat-chested,