360 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



cernible in other directions. The children reared in towns are on the 

 average at all ages, shorter, lighter and of inferior chest-girth when 

 compared with those brought up in the country. They suffer in a 

 larger degree — and in some towns to a very alarming degree — from 

 rickets, decayed teeth, defects of vision, deafness, adenoids, glandular 

 enlargements and affections of the heart and lungs, and again it is 

 demonstrable that all these degenerative changes are more numerous 

 in children living in houses of one or two rooms than in those living in 

 houses with three or more apartments. 



I need not proceed with the sanitary indictment against town life 

 as now constituted. Its misdeeds are written in characters unmis- 

 takable to any one with half an eye in the pale faces, and stunted and 

 misshapen bodies seen in swarms in slum areas; and are recorded in 

 family Bibles, if such pious mementoes are still in vogue, for Mr. 

 Cantlie, after prolonged and careful search, could not find a single 

 person whose ancestors, from their grandfathers downwards, had been 

 born and bred in London. But I should like to say a word or two 

 about one of the countervailing advantages of town life, which is often 

 insisted on and that is, that by the mobility and stimulus it affords, it 

 encourages that ascent of individuals from the lower to the upper social 

 ranks upon which the salvation of society depends. It is, we are told, 

 the concentration of population in cities which best promotes the process 

 of bringing capable men to the front, and recruits the real aristocracy 

 of ability and character amongst us. And if that is so then we must 

 be content to put up with a good deal of destruction of human vigor, 

 in return for the work done by cities as instruments of natural selection 

 in weeding out the incapable and inefficient and advancing the more 

 capable members of society, and in providing us with intellectual 

 leaders. But is city life likely to accomplish all this? 



Professor Karl Pearson, a very thoughtful and cautious anthro- 

 pologist, has told us that decadence of character and of intelligent 

 leadership is to be noted alike in the British merchant, the professional 

 man and the workman. There is a paucity, he says, not only of the 

 better intelligence to guide, but of the moderate intelligence to be 

 guided. And this he attributes to the fact that the intellectual classes 

 are not reproducing their numbers as they did fifty or a hundred years 

 ago. And in this view Professor Pearson is supported by the Prime 

 Minister, who said at Cambridge last year, that in the case of every 

 man who left the laboring class, and became a member of the middle 

 or wealthier classes, his progeny were likely to be diminished, owing to 

 the fact that marriages are later in that class. The prospect thus pre- 

 sented to us is, it must be admitted, a lugubrious one. The better we 

 educate our people and the greater the facilities we give to boys and 

 girls of ability in the lower classes to rise in life, just by so much shall 



