d aunt).
Prohibited in all but four states.

4. First cousins. Marriages of this type are prohibited in over a third
of the states, and tacitly or specifically permitted in the others.

5. Other blood relatives are occasionally prohibited from marrying.
Thus, second cousins in Oklahoma and a child and his or her parent's
half sibs in Alabama, Minnesota, New Jersey, Texas, and other states.

In the closest of blood-relationships the well-nigh universal
restrictions should be retained. But when marriage between cousins--the
commonest form of consanguineous marriage--is examined, it is found to
result frequently well, sometimes ill. There is a widespread belief that
such marriages are dangerous, and in support of this idea, one is
referred to the histories of various isolated communities where
consanguineous marriage is alleged to have led to "an appalling amount
of defect and degeneracy." Without questioning the facts, one may
question the interpretation of the facts, and it seems to us that a
wrong interpretation of these stories is partly responsible for the
widespread condemnation of cousin marriage at the present time.

The Bahama Islands furnish one of the stock examples. Clement A. Penrose
writes[92] of them:

"In some of the white colonies where black blood has been excluded, and
where, owing to their isolated positions, frequent intermarriage has
taken place, as for instance at Spanish Wells, and Hopetown, much
degeneracy is present, manifested by many abnormalities of mind and
body.... I am strongly of the opinion that the deplorable state of
degeneracy which we observed at Hopetown has been in a great measure, if
not entirely, brought about by too close intermarrying of the
inhabitants."

To demonstrate his point, he took the pains to compile a family tree of
the most degenerate strains at Hopetown. There are fifty-five marriages
represented, and the chart is overlaid with twenty-three red lines, each
of which is said to represent an intermarriage. This looks like a good
deal of consanguineous mating; but to test the matter a little farther
the fraternity at the bottom of the chart,--eight children, of whom five
were idiots,--was traced. In the second generation it ran to another
island, and when the data gave out, at the fourth generation, there was
not a single case of consanguineous marriage involved.

Another fraternity was then picked out consisting of two men, both
idiots and congenitally blind, an