EUGENICS AND EUTIIENICS 257 



First, it may be pointed out that such legislation as is 

 enacted does not square with what we know about heredity. 

 It is based on the old notions that parents transmit their 

 traits to their children. Now we know that traits are trans- 

 mitted by means of the germ cells and by them alone, and 

 the resemblance of children to parents is due to the fact 

 that both arise from the same material — the father is half- 

 brother to his child. While a feeble-minded person lacks, 

 ipso facto, the determiner for normal development in his 

 germ cells, still we do not know that his children will be de- 

 fective. Such evidence as we have goes rather to show that 

 if, for example, a man whose germ cells have the determiner 

 for normal mentality marry a feeble-minded woman all of 

 the children will be mentally normal or practically so. I 

 can well imagine the marrying of a well-to-do, mentally 

 strong man and a high-grade feeble-minded woman with 

 beauty and social graces which should not only be pro- 

 ductive of perfect domestic happiness but also of a large 

 family of normal happy children. Half of the germ cells of 

 such children would, indeed, be defective, but as long as the 

 children married into normal strains the offspring, through 

 an indefinite number of generations, would continue to be 

 normal. Yet in many states of the Union such a marriage 

 cannot be legalized; and, in others, the potential mother 

 might be sterilized. 



Secondly, the laws against the marriage of the feeble- 

 minded are unscientific because they attempt no definition 

 of the class. If feeble-mindedness were always as clearly 

 distinct from normality as polydactylism then there would 

 be no objection to the law on this score. But this is by no 

 means the case. If we measure the mentality of 10,000 in- 

 dividuals by a quantitative test, such as that of Binet and 

 Simon, then we shall find that the retardation in mental 

 development for 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, etc., shows no- 



