HEREDITY AND VARIATION 263 



She had a feeble-minded son from whom there have been to the 

 present time 480 descendants. Of these 33 were sexually immoral, 

 24 confirmed drunkards, 3 epileptics, and 143 feeble-minded. The 

 man who started this terrible line of immorality and feeble-minded- 

 ness later married a normal Quaker girl. From this couple a line 

 of 496 descendants have come, with no cases of feeble-mindedness. 

 The evidence and the moral speak for themselves ! 



Parasitism and its Cost to Society. Hundreds of families 

 such as those described above exist to-day, spreading disease, 

 immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to 

 society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals 

 or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families 

 have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others 

 by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually 

 protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely 

 for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from 

 society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites. 



The Remedy. If such people were lower animals, we would 

 probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity 

 will hot allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the 

 sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing 

 intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and 

 degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried success- 

 fully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country. 



Blood Tells. Eugenics show us, on the other hand, in a study 

 of the families in which are brilliant men and women, the fact that 

 the descendants have received the good inheritance from their 

 ancestors. The following, taken from Davenport's Heredity in 

 Relation to Eugenics, illustrates how one family has been famous 

 in American History. 



In 1667 Elizabeth Tuttle, " of strong will, and of extreme 

 intellectual vigor, married Richard Edwards of Hartford, Conn., 

 a man of high repute and great erudition. From their one son 

 descended another son, Jonathan Edwards, a noted divine, and 

 president of Princeton College. Of the descendants of Jonathan 

 Edwards much has been written ; a brief catalogue must suffice : 

 Jonathan Edwards, Jr., president of Union College; Timothy 



