266 MENTAL AND PHYSICAL RESULTS. 



have small families, while the more ignorant and lower classes com- 

 monly have large families. To learn to what extent this practice 

 has existed in the past and what effect birth-ranks have upon the 

 subject I tabulated two hundred New England families, in one hun- 

 dred of which the fathers had birth-ranks of [30] or less, and in the 

 other hundred the fathers had birth-ranks of [40] or more. The 

 fathers having the lower birth-ranks had 568 children, while the 

 fathers having the higher birth-ranks had only 309 children. From 

 what has been previously said in regard to the age of parents at the 

 time their children are born, it is easily seen that this is a process of 

 eliminating the best and selecting the poorest for preservation. It 

 is only necessary for the process to be carried to extremes to end in 

 degeneracy. That it has not led to degeneracy is due partly to the 

 later age at which reproduction begins and partly to the increased 

 amount of mental activity required of each individual before the 

 age of reproduction. 



QUANTITY AND QUALITY IN INCREASE OF POPULATION. 



Much stress has been laid by Galton and others on the necessity 

 for early reproduction as the only means of causing the population 

 to increase, but much more is made of this than there is need of. 

 If the births per annum are 25 or more per 1,000, the number is 

 sufficient to cause the population to increase, because the death rate 

 is some number less than this. As far as mere numbers go, it is 

 immaterial whether this 25 per 1,000 is produced by young parents 

 or by old parents, and as the supply of women over 30 and men 

 over 40 who are capable of reproducing is much greater than 

 necessary to produce this result, it is the part of wisdom to encour- 

 age older persons to become parents. The first step leading to this 

 is to make it known to parents of small families that the product 



