32 THE TREND OF THE RACE 
of pauperism, alcoholism, harlotry and frequently graver forms 
of crime. 
Several investigators have drawn the conclusion that feeble- 
mindedness, which is an inherited trait in probably four-fifths of 
the cases, is transmitted as a recessive or partially recessive 
character, although it is not so evident that it behaves as a single 
unit in inheritance. Feeble-minded children sometimes come 
from normal parents, both of whom, however, may have been 
heterozygous for feeble-mindedness. Such children frequently 
result from the mating of a feeble-minded person with a normal 
individual, but when both parents are feeble-minded we find that 
in nearly all cases all the children are feeble-minded, as we should 
expect. The few recorded exceptions to this rule may be due to 
illegitimacy which is a not infrequent occurrence among this 
class, or to mistaken judgment of the parents’ or the child’s men- 
tal condition, or the fact that one parent may have been feeble- 
minded through accident or disease. Out of 41 matings in the 
Kallikak family in which both parents were feeble-minded there 
were 222 feeble-minded children and only two others that were 
considered normal. In his work on Feeble-mindedness Goddard 
states that of 482 children both of whose parents were feeble- 
minded all but six were reported to be feeble-minded also. 
The conclusion of Goddard that only mentally defective 
children are to be expected from two mentally defective parents 
which was announced by Davenport in 1911 as “‘the first law of 
inheritance of mental ability” was materially modified in a paper 
on the Hill Folk published by Danielson and Davenport in 1912. 
“The analysis of the data,” according to the authors, “gives 
statistical support to the conclusion abundantly justified from 
numerous other considerations, that feeble-mindedness is no ele- 
mentary trait, but is a legal or sociological, rather than a biologi- 
cal term. Feeble-mindedness is due to the absence, now of one 
set of traits, now of quite a different set. Only when both parents 
lack one or more of the same traits do the children all lack the 
traits. So, if the traits lacking in both parenrs are socially impor- 
tant the children all lack socially important traits, z. e., are feeble- 
