Ässorfative Matiitg in Man 483 



limited districts with ,i veiy stablc |)(i|iulat.iiJii. h'or ii] ;i Inrgc uihan |)ii|iiil;it,ii)n, 

 such as is n'presontiHl by the iiiuiliTii url)aii cciiiutcrics, not uiily will a large 

 niixturc ot local races due to ininiigratioii bu ibuiid, but the popiilation beiiig very 

 fluctuating, it is extremely likely that husband and wife will not be interred in the 

 same cemetery, unless thcy die within a coniparatively short period of eaeh other, 

 i.e. unless their ages at death are, in the modal cases of small differenee of age, 

 niuch alike. In most rural districts on the other band with a stable j)o))nIatioii, 

 there is a very streng feeling — anionnting in the easo of (he Yorkshire Dales 

 aimost to a superstition — that husband and wife nuist share the same grave. To 

 test the amount of this spurious assortative matiiig introduced by special urban 

 conditions, we have collected a scries of data from the eemeteries and gnivcyards 

 on the north of London. Whereas the iteeords of the Society of Friends, — whorc 

 every pair is given ivithout seleciion — agree adniirably with the two rural districts 

 ander investigation, the London results practically double tln- value of the apparent 

 assortative niating. The agreement between the pedigree and rural graveyard 

 results seems to indicate that the rural data are little influenced by any transitory 

 character in the population. It is just possible that the slight inerease of 

 correlation as we pass from the Society of Friends Records to the very stable 

 Yorkshire Dale population* and again to rural Oxfordshire may be really due to 

 the source we find so markedly at work in the London series. The results given 

 on p. -iSS should be compared frt)iu this Standpoint. All cases of second and third 

 wives or husbands have been oniitted from the tabulation. The proportion of 

 cases in which a woman marries more than once is shewn by the records of the 

 Society of Friends to be small, actually Icss than one per cent., so that the small 

 fraction of these cases in the chui-chyard records, which may have escaped notice 

 owing to the woman's change of name, cannot sensibly have afifected our results. 

 In Wensleydale at least it is very usual to find the names of both husbands in 

 such cases given on the woman's tombstone. 



3. The foUowing is the material on which our results are based : 



(o) Yorkshire Dale Records. These coniprise tombstone records from Wensley- 

 dale, Wharfedale and adjacent dales. Among the places includod were Hawes, 

 Askrigg, Aysgarth, West Witten, Wensley, Middleham, Redmire, Muker, Arncliffe 

 in Littondale, Kottlewell, Hubberholme, and Bolton Abbey. The great bulk of 

 the tombstone entries in these parish churches refer to the farming population, the 

 labouring class more rarely having stones, and the commercial class being a small 

 element and in itself largely recruited from the farming class. The data were 

 collected by C. D. Fawcett, A. Lee, W. F. R. Weldon and K. Pearson. The work 

 of tabulation and calculation is due to F. E. Lutz and A. Lee. 



{h) 0.rford Rural Records. The country immediately round Oxford is 

 studded with small villages, each with its owu churchyard ; the records are 



* In many of the Yorkshire Dales it is possible to trace even the majority of the families back — many 

 in the same houses — for several bundred years. A study of the church records shows a similar 

 persistence in the labouring as well as in the farming or yeoman classes. 



