AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



791 



being five years older, a scientific man is 

 more likely to be married than a man 

 taken at random from the community. 

 This is perhaps contraiy to general 

 opinion. A tradition of celibacy for the 

 scholar has been inlierited from the Roman 

 Catholic Church, it being only within the 

 time limits of these statistics that fellows 

 of the colleges of the English universities 

 have been permitted to marry. Professor 

 Thorndike^ found that only 12 per cent, 

 of those in ' ' Who 's Who in America ' ' over 

 forty years of age are mimarried. On the 

 other hand, President Eliot- found 28 per 

 cent, of Har\'ard graduates 20 to 25 years 

 out of college to be unmarried. There is 

 a lack of satisfactory statistics of marriage 

 conditions in different classes of the com- 

 munity. For different nations M. Bertil- 

 lon^ states the percentage of unmarried 

 men over fifty years of age to vary from 

 16.3 in Belgium to 3.6 in Hungary, it 

 being 7.5 in Germany and 10.1 in France. 

 Contrary to a wide-spread opinion, the 

 marriage rate and the age at marriage 

 have not varied considerably in the course 

 of the past thirty years. The number of 

 persons married annually for each thou- 

 sand of the population in several countries 

 has been as follows:* 



France 



German Empire. . . . 



Italy 



England and Wales. 

 Sweden 



In England and Germany the rate was 

 highest in the quinquennial period 1896- 

 1900, reaching 16.1 and 18.8, respectively. 

 The percentage of women between 15 and 

 49 years of age who are married ha.s been : 



1 ' ' Marriage amoag Emineat Men, ' ' The Popu- 

 lar Science Monthly, 1902. 



2 Annual Report of the President of Harvard 

 College for 1901-02. 



3" La Depopulation de la France," Paris, 1911. 



* Report of the Registrar-General (England and 

 Wales) for 1910. 



There has tlius been no decrease in 

 marriage corresponding to the decreasing 

 birth rate which has occurred during this 

 period. In France, where the birth rate 

 is the lowest, the marriage rate and the 

 percentage of women married are the 

 higliest. 



The marriage rate varies from year to 

 year with economic and social condition.s, 

 but the percentage of women of child- 

 bearing age who are married proves that 

 marriage is as usual now as it was a gen- 

 eration ago. The conditions, however, are 

 extremely complicated, being influenced 

 b}' birtli rates, death rates, the age con- 

 stitution of the people and immigration. 

 The European nations with the exception 

 of France have supplied great numbers of 

 immigrants during the past thirty years; 

 these are largely people of marriageable 

 age with an excess of unmarried men. 

 This circumstance makes it more signifi- 

 cant that there has been no decrease in 

 marriage in these nations. It explains in 

 large measure tlie relations in France and 

 England, the latter country having been 

 left with an excess in its population of 

 over a million women above fifteen years 

 of age. The comparatively high birtli 

 rates and death rates of a generation a^o, 

 followed by the decreasing birth rates and 

 death rates wliicli have obtained in nearly 

 all nations for the past forty years, give 

 a large percentage of the population be- 

 tween twenty and forty years of age, and 

 are favorable to a high marriage rate and 

 to a large proportion of married people. 

 It is significant of improved conditions 

 regarding the health of married women 

 that among 900 scientific men only 15 are 

 stated to have children bv a second wife 



