16 THE KALLIKAK FAMILY 



the State. Thorough and carefully conducted in- 

 vestigations in the small town and among the farmers 

 of this region showed that the family had always been 

 notorious for the number of defectives and delinquents 

 it had produced ; and this notoriety made it possible 

 to trace them back for no less than six generations. 



It was determined to make a survey of the entire 

 family and to discover the condition, as far as possible, 

 of every person in each generation. 



The surprise and horror of it all was that no matter 

 where we traced them, whether in the prosperous rural 

 district, in the city slums to which some had drifted, or 

 in the more remote mountain regions, or whether it was 

 a question of the second or the sixth generation, an ap- 

 palling amount of defectiveness was everywhere found. 



In the course of the work of tracing various members 

 of the family, our field worker occasionally found her- 

 self in the midst of a good family of the same name, 

 which apparently was in no way related to the girl 

 whose ancestry we were investigating. In such cases, 

 there was nothing to be done but to beat a retreat and 

 start again in another direction. However, these cases 

 became so frequent that there gradually grew the con- 

 viction that ours must be a degenerate offshoot from 

 an older family of better stock. Definite work was 



