Pearson: The First-Born's Handicap 



333 



handicap of the first-born might be 

 made up, and it is important for the 

 reader to keep in mind these differences. 

 If there were a lot of one-child families 

 in the population, and if this single 

 child in each case were inferior, it is 

 obvious that he or she would be listed 

 as first-born in an eninneration, and 

 the first-borns as a whole would get a 

 black mark from the bad record of 

 these one-child families; whereas it 

 is conceivable that the first-borns in 

 large families might at the same time 

 be as good as or better than any of 

 their brothers or sisters. 



It is by such an explanation that some 

 of Pearson's critics attacked his statistics 

 from the Crossley sanitorium, as will 

 be later explained. 



On the other hand, it might be that 

 the first-born in a family was inferior 

 to his or her own brothers and sisters. 

 To demonstrate this would obviously 

 require a different line of statistical 

 attack; and the meaning of the results, 

 from a eugenic point of view, would like- 

 wise be distinctly different. Following 

 Pearson's original contribution, many 

 investigators have adopted this second 

 method of attack altogether. The 

 problem it involves is the more interest- 

 ing and perhaps likewise the more 

 important, but Pearson contends, and 

 with apparent justice, that both prob- 

 lems are worthy of solution, and that 

 the eugenist can not be content if the 

 case is approached from either side 

 alone. 



In his new memoir he has worked out 

 methods of analyzing his data from 

 both points of view. Unfortunately 

 his results are not easily followed in 

 detail by a reader who lacks training in 

 advanced statistical method. This is 

 the more unfortunate, because in some 

 instances a handicap is discernible by 

 the one method of attack, but from the 

 other viewpoint is found to be non- 

 existent — thus in epilepsy, it appears 

 that the greater number of first-born 

 in asylimis is due to the fact that they 

 come from tainted stocks, and not to 

 the fact that they are first-born. 



This distinction must be kept in 

 mind, whenever the problem of the 

 first-born's handicap is studied, for 

 without it an entirely erroneous result 



will be reached, a result likely to cause 

 needless anguish to some of the large 

 number of first-born children in the 

 world. 



DANGERS AT BIRTH 



Before attacking the problem from 

 the conventional side, Pearson notes 

 the dangers which meet the first-born 

 even at birth. Ansell has given the 

 still-births per 1,000 born alive, in order 

 of birth for 48,843 births; the rate for 

 the first-born is 40, for the second-born 

 20, for the third-born 15.5, lor the 

 fourth to sixth 17.4 and for the seventh 

 and over 20.9. "It will be seen that 

 still-births for the first-born are double 

 those of later births. And this dis- 

 advantage follows the first-born into 

 the first year of life." The infantile 

 mortality of the rrofessional and upper 

 classes for 48,843 births, likewise com- 

 piled by Ansell, shows that in the first 

 year, per 1,000 born alive, the following 

 numbers die : 



First-born 82 . 2 



Second-born 70 



Third-born 69 



Fourth to sixth 78.3 



Seventh and over 97.4 



Confirmatory data collected by the 

 Galton Laboratory from the manufac- 

 turing towns of northern England are 

 given. In Sheffield, "it is not till we 

 get to the eight or ninth birth that the 

 mortality is as great as for the first- 

 born." The health of the children 

 follows a similar course — it is not until 

 the thirteenth child, in about 4,400 

 cases from Sheffield, that we find as 

 much delicacy as in the first-born. 

 This inferiority in health, of course, to 

 some extent wears off with age, but it 

 would still appear to be appreciable 

 at twelve and thirteen, according to 

 statistics quoted from school inspections. 



Physical evidence of the defect of the 

 first-born is also found in statistics as 

 to the weights and lengths of 2,000 

 babies, made at Lambeth Lying-in 

 Hospital. The first-born, both in boys 

 and girls,weighs less and is shorter than 

 the subsequent children, who in general 

 increase regularly in these respects in 

 accordance with their order of birth. 

 There is some reason to believe that 

 this increase is correlated to the increas- 



