QUESTION OF PHYSICAL DEGENERATION 259 



creasing, partly through the diminution of the diseases that 

 formerly checked it by an eliminating process, but more through 

 the growing frequency of the marriages of the deaf. Dr Graham 

 Bell fears that a deaf variety of the human race will be formed. 

 Certainly variety, not species, is the word since there is no 

 intersterility between the deaf and sound persons, and this fact 

 enables the defect to spread with very great rapidity. The 

 remedy proposed by Dr Graham Bell, that the deaf should never 

 marry the deaf is, in the light of the facts that are now known, 

 of no avail. Dr Love finds consolation in the fact that the 

 deaf are less fertile than those who are possessed of hearing. 

 But the inferiority is but slight and is likely to be bred out 

 altogether, those in whom it is not found being the parents of 

 most of the next generation of the deaf. As to the remedy, 

 common humanity forbids that there should be any return to the 

 old system which left the deaf helpless and uneducated. The 

 only possible means of checking the evil, therefore, is to dis- 

 courage them from marrying by exhortation and by the plain 

 statement of the facts. In the last resort, legislation is possible. 



Nothing brings out more clearly than the increase of congenital 

 deaf-dumbness, how important Natural Selection is if a species 

 is not to lose rapidly the faculties and powers it owes to the slow 

 process of evolution. 



Civilisation does not tend to produce good teeth. The " heirs Teeth 

 of all in the ages in the foremost files of time " may, only too 

 many of them, look with envy at the teeth of the savage. I give 

 some statistics to emphasise facts that are perfectly well known. 

 The teeth of children in the pauper schools of London have been 

 examined and it has been found that out of 3145 inspected there 

 were only 707 cases in which " neither fillings nor extractions 

 were required." " Even this number, 707, would have been 

 much less, had not 148 children between the ages of nine and 

 seventeen in one school had 256 permanent teeth removed by 

 the medical officer." l 



Only between 17 and 1 8 per cent, possessed of sound teeth 



1 The teeth of pauper chiUrett, p. 6, by R. D. Pedley, F.R.C.S. (reprinted from 

 the Brit. Journal of Denial Science}. 



