INSANITY AND IMBECILITY. 273 



aware of the cause of the abnormality and are not 

 particularly anxious to advertise it. 



Morbid heredity seems to be responsible for 

 about 38 per cent of these dependents.. Estimat- 

 ing that there are 300,000 epileptic and feeble- 

 minded persons in our population of 69,000,000, 

 there would be one such person to every 230 of 

 the entire population; while statistics indicate 

 that where feeble-mindedness exists in families 

 as a hereditary condition, 46 per cent of the off- 

 spring are affected. Therefore, 10,000 persons nes s. 

 made up of families taken from the normal popu- 

 lation produce only 44 feeble-minded offspring; 

 while in a population of 10,000 made up of fami- 

 lies in which one or both parents are feeble- 

 minded, we should expect to find 4,600 defective 

 offspring. 



Mr. Ernest Bicknell, Secretary of the Indiana 

 Board of State Charities, in his article on "Feeble- 

 Mindedness as an Inheritance," read before the 

 National Conference of Charities in '98, said: 

 "We have made a careful study of the histories 

 of 248 families. The whole number of persons 

 composing these 248 families was 887. Of the 

 395 males, 222, or 69 per cent, were feeble- 

 minded. Of the 887 persons therefore, 562, or statistics of the 

 63.2 per cent, were mentally defective. In 101 Feeble-Minded, 

 of the 248 families under consideration have been 

 found a history of feeble-mindedeness in two gen- 

 erations; 12 families, with 77 members, had 

 feeble-mindedness in three generations ; while two 

 families showed 4, and one 5 generations of this 

 defect. Of the 447 persons in the 101 families 

 in which mental deficiency was known to have 



