ASSORTATIVE MATING IN MEN 491 



For criminality, Goring's results will strike many as surprisingly 

 low. They are: 



Very poor and destitute . + .18 



Well-to-do and prosperous poor not calculated 



All + .20 



An interesting point of an entirely different nature has been raised 

 by Heron^° who in a study of the distribution of sex in human families 

 finds, " that in the free mating of man, families with a preponderance 

 of female or male elements are not drawn upon equally with families 

 in which the sexes are more equally balanced." 



VI. HOMOGAMY AND FERTILITY 



From the notion that in marriage " opposite poles attract " the step 

 to the conclusion that dissimilar are more fertile than similar unions 

 is so easy that it has sometimes been taken, though without any valid 

 evidence in justification. 



Fay^^ considers that marriages of the deaf are possibly slightly less 

 fertile than those of hearing persons. When both partners are deaf the 

 percentage of sterile marriages seems higher and the mean number of 

 children in fertile mariages lower than in unions in which one member 

 of the pair is a hearing person.^^ 



Homogamy for stature^^ and for eye color^* have been considered 

 in relation to fertility. 



But as yet the data are far too meager for such complex problems. 

 The whole problem of the relationship between homogamy^^ and fer- 

 tility is open to investigation. 



VII. Significance of the Eesults 



The statistical facts reviewed in this essay make it highly probable 

 that a great variety of physical and mental characters influence human 



"^ Heron, D., "On the Inheritance of the Sex-ratio," BiometriJca, Vol. 5, 

 pp. 79-85, 1907. 



" Fay, E. A., ' ' Marriages of the Deaf in America, ' ' pp. 16-18, 29-30. 



"^ Age at marriage, economic status and other factors probably complicate 

 the problem. 



•"Pearson, K., "On the Correlation of Fertility with Homogamy," Proc. 

 Boy. Soc. Lond., Vol. 66, pp. 28-32; also Biometrika, Vol. 2, pp. 373-376. 



"Pearson {FUl. Trans. Boy. Soc, A, Vol. 195, pp. 148-150, 1900; Froc. Boy. 

 Soc. Lond., Vol. 66, p. 323, footnote) has considered Galton 's data without 

 arriving at final conclusions. De Candolle (fide Westermarck, "History of 

 Human Marriage," p. 335) states that the number of children is considerably 

 smaller when the parents have the same color of eye than when they were con- 

 trasted. Wittrock (Ymer, Vol. 5, pp. vii-ix, 1885) was unable, on Swedish 

 materials, to detect any difference in fertility between the two classes of 

 marriages. 



" Homogamy means merely the mating of physically or psychically similar 

 individuals. Sameness of stock, endogamy, is of course not implied. 



