28 HEREDITY AND SOCIAL FITNESS 



1 11-15 was the st)ii of Jared's wife and a rough, irascible, profane 

 Irishman who belonged to a neurotic family. He was able to progress 

 at school, but was irrita))le and showed little ambition; earned a fair 

 living by teaming. Went West with his lialf-sister and married 

 there a woman of unknown family. Continual domestic friction, 

 attributed in i)art to his nervousness, led to his suicide a few years 

 later. His two daughters (IV-44, 45), remembered as promising little 

 girls, have since been lost track of. 



Summary of Line B. 



The mating of II-4 with II-5 and II-G, men of very different type 

 and belonging to stocks with radically different leading traits, seems to 

 have told decidedly in the traits of the two sons. In the one case 

 nervousness and irresponsibility ; in the other, shrewdness, energy, and 

 ambition to accumulate property are the leading characteristics. 

 In the latter case the gain has not been permanent, such defects as 

 alcoholism and irascibility showing themselves, though it has not been 

 possible to analyze the matings of subsequent generations with sufficient 

 minuteness to learn the hereditary factors. Most of the descendants 

 of III-17 are settled in the same community as the degenerate and 

 defective Lines D and E of this network. They hold themselves 

 decidedly superior to members of these lines, and their defects — 

 alcoholism, irascibility, quarrelsomeness — are in contrast to the 

 defects which characterize these lines. The descendants of III-13, 

 who constitute line B proper, present great uniformity, and the line is 

 noteworthy for the non-appearance of the defects of its founders. 

 Jared's daughter (III-13) seems to have escaped, on the one hand, the 

 shiftlessness and number defect of her father and the sexual looseness 

 characteristic of her mother. Marriage into stock that was free from 

 these defects has insured their elimination in subsequent generations. 

 None of these stocks shows aggressiveness, perseverance, or special 

 abilities of any marked degree, and the line to which they have con- 

 tributed shows accordingly only a fair average of these traits. 



