488 READINGS IN EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 
total number of children represented, 2,259, the child mortality rate 
for this population is found to be 5.27 per cent or 53 per 1,000. 
The smallness of this figure may be seen by comparison with the 
statistics of the registration area, U.S. Census of 1880, when the child 
mortality (o-4 years) was 4oo per thousand, as calculated by Alexan- 
der Graham Bell. A mortality of 53 for the first four years of life is 
smaller than any district known in the United States, even to-day, can 
show for the first year of life alone. If any city could bring the deaths 
of babies during their first twelve months down to 53 per 1,000, it 
would think it had achieved the impossible; but here is a population 
CHILD MORTALITY IN FAMILIES OF LONG-LIVED STOCK, 
GENEALOGICAL RECORD OFFICE DATA 
Size Number of Number of Families Total Number 
of Families Showing Deaths of 
Family Investigated under Five Years Deaths 
1 child 6 ° ° 
2 children 6 ° ° 
3 38 4 5 
4 40 6 7 
5. 38 4 4 
6 44 12 13 
7 34 8 II 
8 46 13 18 
9 St 14 20 
10 27 14 14 
Ir 13 6 9 
12 13 9 16 
13 I ° ° 
14 2 ° ° 
17 I I 2 
340 gr 119g 
in which 53 per 1,000 covers the deaths, not only of the fatal first 12 
months, but of the following three years in addition. 
Now this population with an unprecedentedly low rate of child 
mortality is not one which had had the benefit of any Baby Saving 
Campaign, nor even the knowledge of modern science. Its mothers 
were mostly poor, many of them ignorant; they lived frequently 
under conditions of hardship; they were peasants and pioneers. Their 
babies grew up without doctors, without pasteurized milk, without ice, 
without many sanitary precautions, usually on rough food. But they 
had one advantage which no amount of applied science can give after 
birth—namely, good heredity. They had imherited exceptionally 
good constitutions. 
