F. Galton—Address before the British Association. 278 
thirty-first annual report of the Prison Association of New York, 
1876. It includes no less than 540 individuals of Jukes blood, 
among whom the number of persons who degraded into crim- 
inality, pauperism, or disease, is frightful to contemplate. 
t is difficult to summarize the results in a few plain figures, 
but I will state those respecting the fifth generation, throug 
the eldest of the five prolific daughters of the man who is the 
common ancestor of the race. The total number of these was 
103, of whom thirty-eight came through an illegitimate grand- 
daughter, and eighty-five through legitimate grand-children. 
Out of the thirty-eight, sixteen have been in jail, six of them 
for heinous offences, one of these having been committed no 
less than nine times; eleven others were paupers or led openly 
disreputable lives ; four were notoriously intemperate; the his- 
tory of three had not been traced, and only four were known 
to have done well. The great majority of the women consorted 
with criminals. As to the eighty-five legitimate descendants, 
they were less flagrantly bad, for only five of them ha 
in jail and only thirteen others had been paupers. Now the 
ancestor of all this mischief, who was born dante the year 1730, 
is described as having been a hunter and a fisher, a jolly, com- 
panionable man, averse to steady labor, working hard and 
idling by turns, and who had numerous illegitimate children, 
whose issue has not been traced. He was, in fact, a somewhat 
good specimen of a half-savage, without any seriously criminal 
instincts. The girls were apparently attractive, marrying early 
and sometimes not badly; but the gipsy-like character of the 
race was unsuited to success ina civilized country. So the 
descendants went to the bad, and the hereditary moral weak- 
nesses they may have had rose to the surface and worked their 
mischief without a check. Cohabiting with criminals and 
being extremely prolific, the result was the production of a 
stock exceeding 500 in number, of a prevalent criminal ty 
Through disease and intemperance the breed is now rapidly 
diminishing; the infant mortality has of late been horrible 
among them, but fortunately the women of the me genera- 
tion bear usually but few children, and many of them are alto- 
gether childless. 
his is not the place to go further into details. I have 
alluded to the Jukes family in order to show what extremely 
important topics lie open to inquiry in a single branch of an- 
thropological research, and to stimulate others to follow it out. 
here can be no more interesting subject to us than the quality 
of the stock of our countrymen and of the human race gener- 
ally, and there can be no more worthy inquiry than that which 
eads to an explanation of the conditions under which it dete- 
Tiorates or improves. 
Am. Jour, — Vou. XIV, No. 82.—Ocr., 1877. 
