344 CIVIC BIOLOGY 



excess in the use of coffee or tea must be viewed with 

 suspicion, and many of our best hygienists look with appre- 

 hension at the possible consequences to the race of our 

 sudden, enormously increased gorging of sugar. We can 

 only suggest these as possible lines of study. 



Eugenics and Mendel's law ; bad blood and good. " Peo- 

 ple say one must be able to read and write in order to get 

 along in the world. Now there is Miss . She cannot 

 read or write, yet she gets along all right." l 



This judgment of a feeble-minded woman by an imbecile man 

 helps to explain the rapid increase of such defectives. Avoided 

 by the normal, defectives generally marry defectives. Since 

 they are permitted to multiply at will and are shielded by 

 modern charity from operation of the law of survival of the fit, 

 this process has gone on until we now have nearly 3,000,000 

 dependents and defectives one in thirty of our population. 2 

 By far the larger part (quite possibly, when we have studied 

 to the real genetic root of the matter, we shall find that al- 

 most all) of the heavy burdens imposed upon society by the 

 idiotic, imbecile, and insane, the paupers, alcoholics, and 

 criminals, is caused by inherited mental and moral defect. 



The exhaustive studies of Goddard seem to leave no room 

 for doubt that feeble-mindedness is a recessive, Mendelian, 

 unit character. Hence, according to Mendel's law, the chil- 

 dren of feeble-minded parents must forever all be feeble- 

 minded. Goddard finds this to be true. Normal-mindedness 

 is a dominant unit character. Hence, if one parent is pure 

 normal (duplex) and the other feeble-minded (nulliplex), the 

 children will appear normal but will all have feeble-mindedness 

 recessive (that is, be simplex). When such people become 

 parents, the children will be 1.DD + 2DR + 1RR, that is, 

 three normal to outward appearance and one feeble-minded. 



1 Goddard, Feeble-mindedness : its Causes and Consequences, p. 86. 



2 Kellicott, Social Direction of Human Evolution, p. 34. 



