IMPROVEMENT OF THE HUMAN BREED. 221 



civic worth to compare them with the corresponding grades of adult 

 male stature in our nation. I will take the figures from my * Natural 

 Inheritance/ premising that the distribution of stature in various 

 peoples has been well investigated and shown to be closely normal. The 

 average height of the adult males, to whom my figures refer, was nearly 

 5 feet 8 inches, and the value of their 'normal-talent' (which is a 

 measure of the spread of distribution) was very nearly 1% inches. 

 From these data it is easily reckoned that Class U would contain men 

 whose heights exceed 6 feet I14 inches. Even they are tall enough to 

 overlook a hatless mob, while the higher classes, such as V, W and X, 

 tower above it in an increasingly marked degree. So the civic worth 

 (however that term may be defined) of U-class men, and still more of 

 V-class, are notably superior to the crowd, though they are far below 

 the heroic order. The rarity of a V-class man in each specified quality 

 or group of qualities is as 35 in 10,000, or say, for the convenience of 

 using round numbers, as 1 to 300. A man of the W class is ten times 

 rarer, and of the X class rarer still; but I shall avoid giving any 

 more exact definition of X than as a value considerably rarer than V. 

 This gives a general but just idea of the distribution throughout a 

 population of each and every quality taken separately so far as it is 

 normally distributed. As already mentioned, it does the same for any 

 group of normal qualities; thus, if marks for classics and for mathe- 

 matics were severally normal in their distribution, the combined marks 

 gained by each candidate in both those subjects would be distributed 

 normally also, this being one of the many interesting properties of the 

 law of frequency. 



Comparison of the Normal Classes with those of Mr. Booth. 



Let us now compare the normal classes with those into which Mr. 

 Charles Booth has divided the population of all London, in a way that 

 corresponds not unfairly with the ordinary conception of grades of 

 civic worth. He reckons them from the lowest upwards, and gives the 

 numbers in each class for East London. Afterwards he treats all Lon- 

 don in a similar manner, except that sometimes he combines two classes 

 into one and gives the joint result. For my present purpose, I had to 

 couple them somewhat diilerently, first disentangling them as I best 

 could. There seemed no better way of doing this than by assigning to 

 the members of each couplet the same proportions that they had in 

 East London. Though this was certainly not accurate, it is probably 

 not far WTong. Mr. Booth has taken unheard-of pains in this great 

 work of his to arrive at accurate results, but he emphatically says that 

 his classes cannot be separated sharply from one another. On the con- 

 trary, their frontiers blend, and this justifies me in taking slight 

 liberties with his figures. His class A consists of criminals, semi- 



