490 READINGS IN EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 



But perhaps the reader may think they show nothing of the sort. 

 He may fancy that the early death of a parent left the child without 

 sufficient care, and that neglect, poverty, or some other factor of 

 euthenics brought about the child's death. Perhaps it lacked a 

 mother's loving attention, or perhaps the father's death removed the 

 wage-earner of the family and the child thenceforth lacked the 

 necessities of life. 



Dr. Ploetz has pointed out that this objection is not valid, because 

 the influence of the parent's death is seen to hold good even to the 

 point where the child was too old to require any assistance. If the 

 facts applied only to cases of early death, the supposed objection 

 might be weighty, but the correlation exists from one end of the age- 

 scale to the other. It is not credible that a child is going to be deprived 

 of any necessary maternal care when its mother dies at the age of 69 ; 

 the child herself was probably married long before the death of the 

 mother. Nor is it credible that the death of the father takes bread 

 from the child's mouth, leaving it to starve to death in the absence of a 

 pension for widowed mothers, if the father died at 83, when the ^' child " 

 herself was getting to be an old woman. The early death of a parent 

 may occasionally bring about the child's death for a reason wholly 

 unconnected with heredity, but the facts just pointed out show that 

 such cases are exceptional. The steady association of the child death- 

 rate and parent death-rate at all ages demonstrates that heredity is a 

 common cause. 



But the reader may suspect another fallacy. The cause of this 

 association is really environmental, he may think, and the same 

 poverty or squalor which causes the child to die early may cause the 

 parent to die early. They may both be of healthy, long-lived stock, 

 but forced to live in a pestiferous slum which cuts both of them 

 off prematurely and thereby creates a spurious correlation in the 

 statistics. 



We can dispose of this objection most effectively by bringing in 

 new evidence. It will probably be admitted that in the royal families 

 of Europe, the environment is as good as knowledge and wealth can 

 make it. No child dies for lack of plenty of food and the best medical 

 care, even if his father or mother died young. And the members of 

 this caste are not exposed to any such unsanitary conditions, or such 

 economic pressure as could possibly cause both parent and child to die 

 prematurely. If the association between longevity of parent and 

 child mortality holds for the royal families of Europe and their princely 



