FACE DECLINE. 177 



for Harvard and Bowdoin, respectively, must be compared with the 

 number of surviving chiklren lor tlie native American population of 

 the state of Massachusetts, which is 1.9, less, according to my own 

 observations. 



Less than 2 surviving offspring to reproduce the race for all native- 

 American marriages, 3.1 for those of the limited group of college 

 graduates ! 



This indicates a remarkable change since the days of Benjamin 

 Franklin, who tells us that ' one and all considered each married couple 

 in this country produced 8* children.' Though this is not a conclu- 

 sion drawn from statistical study, it is yet indicative, and in harmony 

 with my own deduction from genealogical records. Whatever the 

 precise figures be, all observations agree as to the high fecundity of 

 the American colonies, and tell of the great change which has taken 

 place in one short century. 



From conditions better than those in any other country, five and 

 more children to the family, such as led to the Malthusian theory of 

 superfecundation and to the fear of over population of the earth's 

 surface, we have passed in hardly one hundred years to our present 

 condition, with a fecundity for the native-born below that of any other 

 country, such that the American race is unable to reproduce itself with 

 a birth rate of 17 per 1,000 population,! hardly 3 children to the family ! 



These facts I first presented in 1901, | with records up to the end 



* Let no one discredit this and call it impossible ! Though surprising to 

 us with a knowledge of the present, these figures are even exceeded at this day 

 by the French-Canadian with a fecundity of 9.2 children to the family, as I 

 gather from a study of one thousand families found in the records of Quebec 

 life insurance companies : 9.3 for the rural, 9.0 for the urban population, is 

 the fecvmdity of the child-bearing woman, not the fecundity per marriage, but 

 nearly so, as sterile marriages are rare. The birth rate of the Russian peas- 

 antry in the Kaluga district, near Moscow, is 7.2 children to the marriage. 

 Throughout Norway it is 5.8 at the present time, as much as it was in the 

 American colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence. 



t That the native population is dying out, and that at an alarming pace, 

 is evident, not alone from a birth rate much lower than that of France, but 

 also from a comparison with that of Berlin. In France the birth rate was 22.5 

 per 1,000 li\dng population; that of the native population of Massachusetts is 

 17 per 1,000; in Berlin, 1891-95, with 10 hirths for every 100 women of child- 

 bearing age, the births were one ninth behind the number necessary to keep the 

 population stationary, whilst in Massachusetts the birth rate is much loiter, 

 6.3 births for 100 adult American born women of child-bearing age. The re- 

 sult is self-evident. 



X The subject has been treated in the following papers by the writer : ' The 

 Increasing Sterility of American Women, with Increase of Miscarriage and 

 Divorce, Decrease of Fecundity.' Engelmann, Jour, of the Amer. Med. Assoc., 

 October 5, 1901. ' Decreasing Fecundity Concomitant with the Progress of 

 Obstetrics and Gynecology.' Engelmann, Philadelphia Med. Jour., January 18, 

 1902. ' Birth and Death Rate as influenced by Obstetric and Gynecic Practice.' 

 Engelmann, Boston Med. and Surg. Jour., May 15, 1902. 



VOL. LXIII. — 12. 



