RESULTS OF EARLY MARRIAGE 



Does It Lead to the Production of Desirable Children, or of Mediocrities? 

 for Facts to Substantiate Theories - Reward Offered for Production 

 of Cases Where Rapid Breeding Led to Good Results 

 from Intellectual Point of View. 



Casper L. Redfield, Chicago, III. 



Need 



MUCH has been said in advocacy 

 of earlier marriages of our 

 superior men and women for 

 the pvirposc of improving the 

 race by producing more numerous 

 progeny from that class of people. A 

 recent example is the article by Pro- 

 fessor Roswell H. Johnson in the 

 Journal of Heredity (Vol. 5, p. 102). 



He says that "we must have our 

 superior men marrying earlier, even at 

 the cost of their early efficiency." Also, 

 that we shoiild "cease prolonging the 

 educational ]5criod past the early twen- 

 ties," and that our present ])ractice of 

 delaying marriages by extending educa- 

 tion into post-graduate studies "cannot 

 go on without serious loss to the race." 

 To illustrate his point Professor Johnson 

 furnishes a diagram showing the great 

 increase in population coming from 

 reproducing at the rate of four genera- 

 tions per century as against reproducing 

 at the rate of three generations in the 

 same time. He says : 



"Suppose a generation to be 25 years or 

 33 1-3 years resjieetively in two different 

 stoeks, and that all persons marry and each 

 couple have four surviving children, or two 

 for each parent. The result is that the 25- 

 year stock constitutes two-thirds of the 

 population at the end of a century." 



The object of reproducing at the rate 

 of four generations to the century is, of 

 course, to ])ro(luce superior individuals 

 and increase the relative number of 

 them in the entire poi)ulation. Well, I 

 will donate one hundred dollars to the 

 treasury of the American Cicnetic Asso- 

 ciation if it can be shown that any 

 superior individual ever was produced 

 by breeding human beings as rapidly 

 as four generations in a century. It is 

 only necessary to find some superior 

 individual from the intellectual stand- 

 316 



point whose date of birth is not more 

 than one hundred years after the aver- 

 age date of birth of his sixteen great- 

 great-grandparents. Any one of the 

 2,000 or 3,000 intellectually eminent 

 men known to history, who comes in the 

 four-gcnerations-to-thc-centviry class, 

 will draw the hundred dollars. 



To make the matter interesting and 

 easy, I will be satisfied to give the one 

 hundred dollars if there can be found 

 more than three cases in which the 

 intellectually superior person has as 

 many as four generations in a century 

 in the tail-male line alone. The three 

 cases are an allowance of about one- 

 tenth of one per cent, for errors in 

 records or i)ossible cases in which the 

 putative father is not the real father. 



In the northern ])art of the United 

 States, and in the central and western 

 part of Europe, the average time for 

 three generations in the tail-male line 

 is approximately 97 years. It is much 

 less in most other parts of the world. 

 In three generations of ancestors there 

 are one father, two grandfathers and 

 four great-grandfathers — a total of seven 

 males. In any case in which the average 

 age of these males was 33 1-3 years or 

 less at the time the succeeding persons 

 in the pedigree were bom, the final 

 product would be in the threc-genera- 

 tions-to-the-century class — males only 

 considered. It will be evident that 

 much more than one-half of all people 

 come within the three-generations-to- 

 the-century class as thus defined. 



Now raising the standard of superior 

 individuals to the exce])tionally great 

 men such as Aristotle, Augustus, New- 

 ton, Bacon, Faraday, Franklin. Hirni- 

 boldt, Cuvier, Danvin, etc., of whom 

 there arc some two or three hundred 

 known to history, I will give a second 



