THE APPLICATION TO MAN 303 



"After the Revolutionary war, Martin married a 

 Quaker girl of good ancestry and settled down to live 

 a respectable life after the traditions of his fore- 

 fathers. From this legal union with a normal woman 

 there have been 496 descendants. All of these except 

 two have been of normal mentality and these two were 

 not feeble-minded. . . . The fact that the descendants 

 of both the normal and the feeble-minded mother have 

 been traced and studied in every conceivable environ- 

 ment, and that the respective strains have always been 

 true to type, tends to confirm the belief that heredity 

 has been the determining factor in the formation of 

 their respective characters." 



Other recent extensive studies of dysgenic lines in- 

 clude the "Nams," the "Hill Folk," the "Pineys" of 

 New Jersey, the "Ishmaels" of Indiana and the 

 "Zeros" of Denmark. 



4. MORAL AND MENTAL CHARACTERS BEHAVE 

 LIKE PHYSICAL ONES 



These instances of human breeding show unmistak- 

 ably that "blood counts" in human inheritance, even 

 though the hereditary unit characters that lead to 

 these general results have not yet been analyzed with 

 the clearness that is possible in dealing with the char- 

 acters of some animals and plants. 



There is of course no question of moral and mental 

 traits in plants, and the role that these play in animals 

 is not easy to determine; but in man the case is un- 

 doubtedly much more important and complex, since 



