MANIFESTED IN HUMAN SOCIETY 117 



and to supply that infant with the natural food for the 

 natural period. Most of the flat-chested girls who sur- 

 vive their high-pressure education are incompetent to do 

 this. Were their fertility measured by the number of 

 children they could rear without artificial aid, they would 

 prove relatively very infertile." 1 



The remarks about flat-chested girls and the over- 

 taxing of their brains need not be taken too seriously. 

 This is special pleading. Infertility is not confined to 

 flat-chested girls of inferior physique. On the contrary, 

 it is most conspicuous among those women who have 

 had the advantage of good feeding and the best physical 

 training. It is very common among women of a pro- 

 nounced athletic tendency. Physical culture and bodily 

 labour, it should be borne in mind, are very different 

 things. The one consists of exercise in moderation, 

 often accompanied, as in the case of games, with agreeable 

 mental stimulus. The other consists of more or less 

 exhausting drudgery, often depressing in its effects. 

 The difference in nervous energy between a well-fed, 

 athletic women and the average poorly-fed and depressed 

 wash-woman is conspicuous. 



The view that severe mental effort seriously affects 

 the fertility of women receives strong confirmation from 

 a statement by Dean Inge before the National Birthrate 

 Commission. " A few years ago very careful statistics 

 were drawn up as to the fertility of women, either both 

 at Oxford and Cambridge or at Oxford alone I am not 

 quite sure which arranging them in classes, with the 

 remarkable result that the third-class women had more 

 children than the second-class, and the second-class 

 more children than the first-class. Those who had been 

 through a severe intellectual course were sterile, and 

 1 Principles oj Biology, vol. ii, part vi, chap. xii. 



