410 



Life and Letters of Francis Galton 



evidence derivwJ from hnxxlors of st4K-k. It is very p«>s.sihle that indiflFerence on the part of 

 young husbandu to aging wives may have itonicthing to do with it." (p. 22.) 



An important remwk uiatle by Galton is that while his table unci the 

 smoothwl isogens give the mean percentile fertilities at each age of husband 

 and wife, they fail to mea.sure the degive of individiial variation from this 

 mean ; the nature of this variation, he remarks, could l>e found from the 

 original observations with a moderate amount of work, and it would be 

 of much interest to determine whether it varies in accordance with some 

 definite law. 



The second paj)er deals with a problem which Galton had special dehght 

 in handling. Nothing pleased him more than to dispel a current superstition 

 by statistical criticism. We have alreiuly seen how he tested in this way 

 the objective efficacy of prayer. In the present instance', with Mr Edgar 

 Schuster's aid, he attacked the belief widely spread, especially among Roman 

 Catholics, that Church property sequestrated at the time of the Reformation 

 carried a curse with it; the effect of the curse was to e.vtinguish the line 

 of the owner by the death before inheritance of his sons, especially the eldest 

 son. The phrase " Church property " is a|)plied to estates which were in 

 whole or part ecclesiastical previous to the dissolution of the monasteries 

 under Henry VIII, and "Not Church property" to those that were not. 



There is therefore no appreciable effect jjroduced by the cunse in either 

 thwarting the inheritance of eldest sons, or in shortening the tenure of the 

 ownership of Church property. It was found, however, that Church pro- 

 perties change^l hands much more frequently than non-Church properties; 

 transmissions by purchase were almost three times jus fretpieiit. Galton was 

 Inclined to ascribe this to the comparative unsuitability to modern require- 



"S(vjur?(rtrat«d Church Property." Nature, Vol. lxxix, p. .308, January 14, 1909. 



