DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE. 



277 



Dr. Engclmann claims that an older 

 age at marriage docs not mean a 

 smaller family, that the maiTiage rate 

 of the college graduate is higher and 

 the size of the surviving family larger 

 than in the population at large, and 

 that the decreasing size of family is 

 entirely voluntary. We think that he 

 has established none of these conclu- 

 sions. Adequate statistics may not be 

 at hand correlating the size of family 

 with the age of marriage, but it seems 

 almost certain that there is an in- 

 verse correlation, those who marry 

 later having fewer children. This 

 would hold especially for women — and 

 older men are likely to marry older 

 women — and for men who remarry. 

 It is also of course true that earlier 

 marriages produce a more rapid se- 

 quence of generations and a larger 

 population. 



Dr. Engelmann gives 2.1 as the size 

 of family of graduates more than 

 twenty years out of college and 1.9 

 as the size of family of the native- 

 born in Massachusetts, and tells us 

 that the college graduate does more 

 towards reproducing the population 

 than does the native American of 

 other class. He appears to be in 

 serious error in his statistics. A cer- 

 tain loyal Princeton graduate discov- 

 ered that his class of '76 had 2.7 sur- 

 viving children for each married grad- 

 uate. Whether this case is typical 



or not we do not know, but Dr. 

 Engclmann gives it the same weight 

 in his average as the 1.86 ob- 

 tained from 1,401 Harvard graduates. 

 The families of Princeton and Yale 

 gi'aduates and of many Harvard grad- 



j uates coming from a region having 

 higher fertility can not be compared 

 with the decadent native population 

 of Massachusetts, nor can college 



j graduates in part of foreign origin 

 be compared with the exclusively na- 

 tive population. Dr. Engelmann com- 

 pares the native surviving Massachu- 

 setts family of 1.9 with that of college 

 graduates of more than twenty years' 

 standing. The native population in- 

 cludes girls of fourteen and women 

 just married. The average number of 

 living children of native women of 

 INIassachusetts between the ages of 

 forty and forty-nine was 2.13. With 



I this family and a marriage rate of 79 

 per cent, the population is rapidly 

 decreasing. Harvard gi-aduates, with 



j a marriage rate of 71.4 and a family 



I of 1.86 surviving for a time are des- 

 tined to even more rapid extermina- 

 tion. The Harvard graduate of New 

 England stock is doubtless still more 

 infertile, but we have no exact infor- 

 mation in regard to this, nor as to 

 whether or not the college gi'aduate is 

 more infertile than the race and class 

 from which he comes. Editor.] 



