168 NATURAL INHERITANCE. [chap. 



If consumption, cancer, drink and suicide, appear among 

 the recorded cases of death less frequently than they do 

 in ordinary tables of mortality, then a bias towards 

 suppression could be proved and measured, and would 

 have to be reckoned with ; otherwise the returns might be 

 accepted as being on the whole honest and outspoken. 

 T find the latter to be the case. Sixteen per cent, of 

 the causes of death (or 1 in 6-|) are ascribed to consump- 

 tion, 5 per cent, to cancer, and nearly 2 per cent. 

 to drink and to suicide respectively. Insanity was not 

 specially asked about, as I did not think it wise to put 

 too many disagreeable questions, however it is often 

 mentioned. I dare say that it, or at least eccentricity, 

 is not unfrequently passed over. Careful accuracy in 

 framing the replies appears to have been the rule rather 

 than the exception. In the preface to the blank forms 

 of the Records of Family Faculties and elsewhere, I had 

 explained my objects so fully and they were so reason- 

 able in themselves, that my correspondents have 

 evidently entered with interest into what was asked for, 

 and shown themselves willing to trust me freely with 

 their family histories. They seem generally to have 

 given all that was known to them, after making much 

 search and many inquiries, and after due references to 

 registers of deaths. The insufficiency of their returns 

 proceeds I feel sure, much less from a desire to suppress 

 unpleasant truths than from pure ignorance, and the 

 latter is in no small part due to the scientific ineptitude 

 of the mass of the members of the medical profession 

 two and more generations ago, when even the stetho- 



