526 IMPROVEMENT OF THE HUMAN BREED. 



In the lowest lines the same values are given, but more roughly, to 

 the nearest whole percentage. 



It will assist in comprehending the values of ditl'erent grades of 

 civic worth to compare them with the corresponding grades of adult 

 male stature in our nation. I will take the figures from ni}^ Natural 

 Inheritance, premising that the distribution of stature in various peo- 

 ples has been well investigated and shown to be closely normal. The 

 average height of the adult males, to whom my figures refer, was 

 nearly 5 feet 8 inches, and the value of their "normal talent"" (which 

 is a measure of the spread of distribution) was very nearly If inches. 

 From these data it is easily reckoned that class U would contain men 

 whose heights exceed 6 feet li inches. Even the}^ are tall enough to 

 overlook a hatless mob, while the higher classes, such as V, W, and X, 

 tower above it in an increasingly marked degree. So the civic worth 

 (however that term may be defined) of U-class men, and still more of 

 V-clas8, are notably superior to the crowd, though they are far below 

 the heroic order. The rarity of a V- class man in each specified quality 

 or group of qualities is as 35 in 10,000, or, say, for the convenience of 

 using round numbers, as 1 to 300. A man of the W class is ten times 

 rarer, and of the X class rarer still; but I shall avoid giving any more 

 exact definition of X than as a value considerably rarer than V. This 

 gives a general but just idea of the distribution throughout a popula- 

 tion of each and every quality taken separately so far as it is normally 

 distributed. As already mentioned, it does the same for any group of 

 normal qualities; thus, if marks for classics and for mathematics were 

 severally normal in their distribution, the combined marks gained by 

 each candidate in both those subjects would be distributed normally 

 also, this being one of the many interesting properties of the law of 

 frequency. 



COMPARISON OF THE NORMAL CLASSES WITH THOSE OF MR. BOOTH. 



Let us now compare the normal classes with those into which Mr. 

 Charles Booth has divided the population of all London, in a way that 

 corresponds not unfairly with the ordinary conception of grades of 

 civic worth. He reckons them from the lowest upward, and gives the 

 numbers in each class for East London. Afterwards he treats all Lon- 

 don in a similar manner, except that sometimes he combines two classes 

 into one and gives the joint result. For n\y present purpose I bad to 

 couple them somewhat differentlj', first disentangling them as I best 

 could. There seemed no better way of doing this than by assigning to 

 the members of each couplet the same proportions that the}" had in 

 East London. Though this was certainly not accurate, it is probably 

 not far wrong. Mr. Booth has taken unheard-of pains in this great 

 work of his to arrive at accurate results, ])ut he emphatically says that 

 his classes can not be separated sharply from one another. On the 



