256 THE TREND OF THE RACE 



sprang from a small group of nine Englishmen, six Tahitian men 

 and fifteen Tahitian women who settled originally on Pitcairn 

 Island in 1790. In 1855 the population which had increased to 

 200 removed to Norfolk Island whose population in 1905 num- 

 bered 1,059, most of whom were descended from the original set- 

 tlers. Sixteen returned to Pitcairn Island in 1856 where they 

 rapidly increased and became a healthy, flourishing people. 



In his studies of half-breed Indians, Boas states that "the 

 average number of children of five hundred and seventy-seven 

 Indian women and of one hundred and forty-one half-breed 

 women more than forty years old is 5.9 children for the former 

 and 7.9 for the latter. It is instructive to compare the number of 

 children for each woman in the two groups. While about ten per 

 cent of the Indian women have no children, only 3.5 per cent of 

 the half-breeds are childless. The proportionate number of 

 half-bloods who have one, two, three, four or five is smaller than 

 the corresponding number of Indian women, while many more 

 half-blood than fuU-blood women have had from six to thirteen 

 children." 



That the hybrids between the races of man tend to sterility 

 still awaits proof. We have no adequate evidence of sterility 

 even in the hybrids between those races which are most distantly 

 related. It has been claimed that marriages between different 

 people of the same race, such as the Nordic and Mediterranean or 

 Alpine are relatively infertile, but the evidence is far from proving 

 that the causes are physiological and not social. From a study of 

 a large number of marriages of different European peoples Prof. 

 A. E. Jenks has drawn the conclusion that pure bred stock is much 

 more fecund than cross bred stock. Since the conclusion if valid 

 would have a far-reaching significance, it is desirable to consider 

 critically the evidence on which it is based. The material con- 

 sisted of 40,000 famihes of Minneapolis, Minn., 480 families of 

 Sioux Falls, S. Dak., and 95 families of Benton Township, Lincoln 

 Co., Minn. An enumeration was made of the number of unmar- 

 ried offspring in the families of various nationalities in which 

 both parents came from the same country and also in the families 



