50 RECENT MISINTERPRETATIONS OF NATURE AND NURTURE 



In these aspects feeding is associated with physical rather than 

 parental environment. It will thus be evident that our division into 

 categories can only be very general. Even such a physical feature 

 as "housing" may be really a result of nature. An alcoholic father 

 may mean irregular wage and this enforces low rent and so bad 

 housing on the children. We have therefore in some way to get rid 

 of parental habits and parental health from the physical environment 

 correlations before we can say, this is the measure of pure nurture on 

 child welfare. We achieve this by correcting for these nature factors, 

 we take the partial correlation of the physical environmental factor 

 with the child's health or other welfare character for constant parental 

 habits and health. We must allow for the fact that the physically 

 and mentally inferior parents tend to occupy the cheaper houses. 

 It is impossible to attribute to the house what is really due to physical 

 and mental wreckage drifting where there is least to pay. It is largely 

 this fact, not the physical state of the home which is reflected in the 

 nurture of the children. With the assistance of Miss Elderton I have 

 endeavoured to classify "environmental factors" as follows: 



(i) Physical Factors, as in housing and sanitation. 



(ii) Parental Factors. 



(a) Direct Parental Factors as in Habits, Cleanliness, Use of 



Ventilation, &c. 



(6) Indirect Parental Factors as in Wage, Occupation of Father, 

 Employment of Mother, &c. 



Now I will ask you to look at the accompanying Table V for three 

 manufacturing towns, Rochdale, Bradford and Blackburn. It does 

 not cover any material previously dealt with in this paper and is a 

 fair sample of the environmental correlations we have reached. On 

 the left-hand side of the table we give the crude correlation values; 

 on the right-hand side we correct these correlations in part for health 

 and habits of parents, so as to remove as far as possible the nature 

 factor. But we have only been able to do this in part. Thus for 

 Rochdale we could correct for habits of parents only; for Blackburn 

 we could correct for health of parents only. In Bradford we have 

 corrected for health of mother only. Thus it will be clear that the 

 values reached are not true corrected values, but maximum values, 

 the actual associations between welfare of child and pure environ- 

 mental influences being still lower than those recorded in our 

 "corrected" columns. Now the reader will observe that of the three 

 main divisions Physical Environment, Indirect Parental Environment 



