Excerpt from Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population Much space is given to the alleged innate horror of incest, and frequent appeals are made to Scripture, wrongly assuming that the marriage of cousins is prohibited in the Mosaic Law. The origin of prohibited degrees is only conjectural. The Christian Church apparently borrowed its prohibitory canons from the Roman Law,1 and a dispensation is still necessary before a Catholic can marry his first cousin. However, such dispensations have always been easy to ob tain, especially by royal families, and even the marriage of uncle and niece sometimes occurs, as among the Spanish Habsburgs, and as recently as 1889 in the House of Savoy. The prohibition of the marriage of first cousins was re moved in England by the Marriage Act of but by this time the idea of the harmfulness of kinship marriage was so thoroughly impressed upon the people that they were very prone to look askance at such unions, and if they were followed by any defective progeny, the fact would be noted, and looked upon as a chastisement visited upon the parents for their sin. Naturally the idea became proverbial, and in some places it has influenced the civil law. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.