6i 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



plishraents." A few were more highly educated, and yet as large a 

 proportion of the latter as of the former have married, and the largest 

 families of the present generation belong to the most highly educated 

 of the women. 



Within a stone's-throw of where I sit are half a dozen well-to-do 

 American families. Taken together, there are not as many children 

 in them as there are parents, and in none of them will there presumably 

 be any increase. Not one of these mothers is in any sense a highly 

 educated woman. 



In one hundred and seventy-five American families I find an aver- 

 age of 3*2 children (now adults in most cases) to each. In one sixth of 

 them there is but one child each. (No childless families are included.) 

 Of the few really large families, the evidence seems to be that the 

 mothers were in most cases well educated ; in a few cases, exception- 

 ally so. Taken as a whole, they represent a very wide range of female 

 education, from the most ordinary to the highest which the time af- 

 forded. I have made many inquiries as to the proportion of children 

 in American and foreign families in the schools of Brooklyn and New 

 York, and I find that in the German, Irish, and Italian families there 

 are two, three, and four times as many children, upon an average, as 

 there are in the American family. 



It would be difficult for even the most prejudiced observer to at- 

 tribute these maternal deficiencies to the " higher education of wom- 

 en"; and it is a little singular that we are so often treated to a bald 

 statement of the " higher-education " theory, without any facts being 

 adduced by which to prove it. The diminishing and vanishing native 

 family is a fact, but a fact which must be accounted for in some other 

 way than the one proposed. 



In turning elsewhere for an explanation, we will leave out of our 

 present discussion those men — and their name is legion — who have 

 brought to their wedded lives only the remnant of a vitiated or shat- 

 tered constitution, or those in whom the instinct of fatherhood seems 

 to be so nearly wanting, that they are not willing to make any of the 

 sacrifices incident to the rearing of a family ; and will consider the 

 question solely from conditions which obtain with the other sex. 



Here the two great primary causes are — 1. Physical disability. 2. 

 Disinclination to bear and rear children. We will briefly consider 

 these in their order, though their order could well be reversed if in 

 that lay any indication of their relative importance. 



There is something almost ludicrous in the spectacle of a physician, 

 educated and professedly observing, passing over without a word all 

 the death-dealing follies which are making invalids of tens of thou- 

 sands of women all about him, while he lifts his voice in dismal croak- 

 ing over the awful prospect which looms before his jaundiced vision, 

 of a time when more women shall be educated. Forgetting .ill else, 

 he might have spared one thought for that doomed multitude, shut off 



