398 CAROLINE H. ROBINSON 



married, as a whole, to wives somewhat younger, does not vitiate but intensi- 

 fies the conclusion we draw from table 6, b, as follows: Childlessness is 

 excessive for these college men married under 30. Also the one-child fam- 

 ilies are too numerous for the women wed at 25-34 years. The real dreadful 

 weakness in these inferences is of course that the numbers are too few. 

 It is, however, surprising to realize that the numbers surviving of each sex 

 among these collegians are each one-fifth of the corresponding Milbank 

 professional figures of similar date. If then I have only 176 surviving 

 females wed at 20-30 years, the Milbank studies therefore had not more 

 than about 880 thus wed. The notable point to me is that to get these 880 

 particular examples from the so scarce professional class it was necessary 

 for Dr. Notestein's clerks at the Milbank foundation to examine about 

 300,000 census schedules. There are economies and conveniences in the 

 study of college records, and there is perhaps this disadvantage — that one 

 is tempted by the urgency of the issues at stake to draw conclusions from 

 the small groups wed at given ages. For, as we have said it is here and in 

 group per capitas for both single and married together that one must truly 

 analyze the leaks draining the professional birthrate. 



It may be that Huntington and Whitney 15 were too optimistic in con- 

 cluding that college women if married young would not be more troubled 

 with sterility than the average. College women unfortunately (?) would 

 usually rather stay single than marry into the general population, where 

 fertility appears perhaps better under 30 years of age, at least in England. 



How shall we interpret the facts in table 4 that the women's sterility 

 runs less than the men's (weddings under 35 years) but that women are 

 as much or more liable to have only one child? Tentatively, it may be 

 connected with the college woman's known reluctance to take poor bargains 

 in wedlock. College women are more often able to spot and reject the 

 essentially weak and sterile man than they are the man who will give but 

 one child — shall we say? Table 5 does not lend much support to the idea 

 that women, oftener than men, have a single child only because of dislike — 

 for the women in that table are, far more than the men, unfitted physio- 

 logically by their age, yet they have nearly as many children. 



An examination of 59 men and women whose marriages, though prompt, 

 yielded no children or in the case of the men only one child, shows nothing 

 either known or at least significant about 18. But in 21 cases the unsatis- 

 factory fertility after prompt marriage was conjoined with premature 

 death or known ill health, often specific. In at least half a dozen cases it 



16 Op. cil., p. 50. 



