No. 564] INHERITANCE OF LEFT-H . 1 NDEDNES8 731 



tion from the students in regard to right- and left- 

 handedness in their own families or in other families 

 with which they might be quite familiar. Each student 

 noted down the parents and every child in the family. 

 Since the students who reported are from nineteen to 

 twenty-five years of age, the probability is that tlieir 

 families are now complete as to the number of children. 

 Similar data were collected from another set of students 

 in 1912. In addition to these collections of statistics, I 

 have also studied the affection in a family of four genera- 

 tions, including about thirty people. Since this material 

 offers nothing especially different from that gathered 

 from the students, I have not included it in the present 

 study. 



TABLE I 



Value of Different Data. — Since the young people from 

 whom the information was obtained would be much more 

 likely to know of left-handedness among their brothers 

 and sisters than in their parents, the reports for children 

 are probably more accurate than those for parents. Tt is 

 easy to see how a child would report a parent as right- 

 handed unless the person were very definitely left-handed. 

 A child would not know about the early history of his 

 father or mother. On comparison of the number of left- 

 handed individuals among parents and children left- 

 handedness seems to be about twice as common among the 

 children. This is, of course, a manifest absurdity and is 



