800 



AMEEICAX MEN OF SCIENCE 



Graduates of colleges for women also 

 have had families of about two, but half 

 of them remain unmarried. The Harvard 

 graduate thus has on the average three 

 fourths of a son, the Vassar graduate one 

 half a daughter. 



Since this article was written and pub- 

 lished in ab.stract elsewhere/^ there have 

 appeared two excellent articles on the size 

 of family of college graduates. Johnson 

 and Stutzmann^*' find that about half 

 of Wellesley College almuna graduating 

 from 1879 to 1888 married and had fam- 

 ilies averaging 1.56 children. John C. 

 Phillips^^ gives data from the cla.ss re- 

 ports of Har\'ard and Yale students com- 

 piled twenty-five years after graduation. 

 Seventy-four per cent, of Har\'ard gradu- 

 ates and 78 per cent, of Yale graduates 

 had married. The number of children 

 born for each married graduate decreases 

 from about 3 in the fifties to 1.8 in 1890. 

 As Mr. Phillips points out, the decrease 

 becomes slower between 1875 and 1890. 



Table X. The Sizes of the Families in accord- 

 ance WITH the Education of the Mothes 



In Table X. it is shown that the families 

 of scientific men in which the mothers 

 have had a college education are not ap- 

 preciably smaller than others. If one re- 

 gards only the total, it appears that when 



15 Proceedings of the First National Conference 

 on Race Betterment, January, 1914; The Inde- 

 pendent, September 17, 1915. 



i<i JoitnuU of Heredity, 1915. 



17 Harvard Graduates Magazine. September, 

 1916. 



the mother had a college education the 

 average family is about 2, when she had 

 a partial college education 2.1 and when 

 she had none 2.3, but these differences are 

 chiefly and probably entirely due to the 

 fact that the younger scientific men have 

 the smaller families and at the same time 

 are more likely to marry college graduates. 

 If we divide the scientific men into three 

 age groups, the differences become much 

 less, and if the groups were subdivided 

 still further they would probably disap- 

 pear. This illustrates the possibility of 

 statistical fallacies when a group is not 

 homogeneous. Of the scientific men under 

 fifty, 109 married college graduates and 

 had families of the average size of 1.81, 

 33 married women with a normal school 

 or partial college education and the aver- 

 age family was 1.79, 119 married women 

 without a college education and the aver- 

 age family was 1.98. Fifty-four per cent, 

 of scientific men under 50 have married 

 women with a college education; for sci- 

 entific men from 50 to 59 the percentage 

 falls to 35 and for those 60 or older to 19. 

 The figures result not only from the 

 increasing number of women undergoing 

 higher education, but also from an exten- 

 sion of common scientific interests and 

 pursuits for men and women. A distin- 

 guished biologist has observed that *'if 

 marriages are made in heaven. Woods 

 Hole may be regarded as a branch office." 

 To the same biologist we owe the remark 

 that ''eugenics is an infant industry." 

 There is truth in both epigrams. The per- 

 centage of men who have married women 

 with whom they have been thrown into 

 association as teachers or fellow students 

 is large, and Ave are at present ignorant 

 of the results of such marriages. Small as 

 are the families of scientific men, it is here 

 shown that they are not so because tiie 

 mother is a college graduate. If botii 

 mother and father have common scien- 

 tific aptitudes and interests, the physical 

 hereditv and social traditions should lead 



