LONG LIFE MEANS MANY CHILDREN 
And Long Life Also Means a Good Inheritance—Study of Longevity Brings 
Important Proof to the Theory of Evolution 
Plymouth, N. C., Dec. 3.—W. B. Davis, 94 
years old and father of 41 children, 33 of whom 
are alive, got a license Wednesday to wed a 
Mrs. Mason, 39 years old, who lives near here. 
The ceremony was performed yesterday. 
Twenty-five children and more than a hundred 
grandchildren of the bridegroom attended. 
Mr. Davis has 192 grandchildren and a 
number of great-grandchildren. This is his 
fourth venture in matrimony. He is enjoying 
health, but has complained of being lonesome. 
[sien ene parent—many chil- 
dren: the connection seems too 
obvious to be worth noting. 
But it is very well worth noting. 
The simple fact illustrated in the above 
newspaper clipping means a great deal 
not only to eugenics, but to the whole 
theory of evolytion. 
First let us make sure of our facts. 
If we pick at random from the death 
records the names of two women, one of 
whom died at the age of 50 and the 
other at the age of 75, will the longer- 
lived be found to have left the larger 
family? Both of them, you must 
notice, lived past the reproductive 
period, and it might be supposed that 
after that period a few years more or 
less could make no difference. 
Nevertheless, the study of Karl 
Pearson and his associates! leaves no 
doubt that the longest-lived parents 
have the largest number of offspring. 
They were able to study family records 
of some thousands of English and 
American Quaker families, and reached 
this conclusion: 
“Fertility is correlated with _lon- 
gevity even after the fecund period is 
passed. If we take American mothers 
there is no doubt of this increasing 
fertility even up to 90 years of age. 
With English mothers it is less marked, 
but appears to be quite true up to 75 
years. Beyond 75 there appears a 
slight decrease.” 
In other words, the peculiar physique, 
the vitality and the toughness of consti- 
tution in both men and women, which 
make longevity possible, are also asso- 
ciated with fecundity. Where you find 
one, you are likely to find the other. 
Of two women who both live beyond 
50 years, the longer lived is likely to 
have had, before 50, the larger number 
of children. 
It is not easy to understand why this 
condition should be more marked for 
American parents than for English 
parents, for the American families dealt 
with were, in the great majority of 
cases, of Anglo-Saxon race. Evidently 
climate, mode of life, and similar in- 
fluences are bringing about a difference 
in this respect, between the English and 
the Anglo-American stocks. 
Remembering that long life is asso- 
ciated with numerous offspring, let us 
now recall that long life is due primarily 
to heredity. Contrary to what one 
might suppose, people do not attain to 
a great age because of any particular 
habits of life, any particular kind of 
diet or brand of beverage. They live 
long because they come of a long-lived 
stock, because they .have inherited the 
kind of constitution that, in circum- 
stances which are reasonably favorable, 
will stand the strain of existence for an 
unusually long time. 
We are now in a position to see how 
the connection between long life and 
large families will assist us in under- 
standing how evolution works. 
In the first place, Darwin and many 
others have shown that the members of 
a race least fitted to their surroundings 
are removed by death. For example, 
of two children born in a neighborhood 
where tuberculosis is abundant, the one 
with an inherited resistance is pretty 
1 On the Correlation between Duration of Life and the Number of Offspring. By Miss M. 
Beeton, G. U. Yule and Karl Pearson. 
Proc. R. S. London, 67 (1900), pp. 159-171. 
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