QUESTION OF PHYSICAL DEGENERATION 255 



The facts that have been collected by thoroughly com- 

 petent investigators, mainly in America, enable us unhesi- 

 tatingly to draw our conclusions. And this, though as yet 

 the experiment has not yet been carried very far. Dr Graham 

 Bell wrote in 1883 : " We have received into our institutions only 

 the first generation of deaf-mutes born from the intermarriage of 

 deaf-mutes." 2 Before the education of the deaf and dumb, few 

 of them married. Nearly 78 per cent, of all the marriages recorded 

 in the reports of the American Asylum (the oldest institution in 

 the country) seem to have been contracted since the year l843- 3 



1 See Marriages of the Deaf, p. 96. 



^ Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. ii. p. 215. 3 Loc. cit. p. 2O2- 



