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Hereditary Split-Foot or Lobster-Claw 
The additional information now obtained is of much interest. We can assert : 
(i) That our increased knowledge has not shown the deformity to give any 
closer approach to Mendelian inheritance — on the contrary the disproportionate 
number of abnormals has increased. 
(ii) That the experience of the last five years further emphasises the 
importance of legislative interference with the propagation of deformity. 
Pearson in 1908 laid stress on the wide variation found in the types of hand 
and foot, and remarked that all Lewis and Embleton's types from the G\-family 
with the exception of the "cross-bones" had been found in the S.-family ; but he 
suggested that this might also be revealed if the whole family were skiagraphed. 
McMullan has now shown that this type actually exists. 
A careful comparison of the present pedigree with the former one will show 
that, if additional births be put on one side, the chief changes are in the orders of 
birth in the earlier generations. We cannot lay much stress even now on these 
orders. In the class with which we have here to deal, the members frequently 
seem uncertain of their own ages — and are therefore ignorant of their brothers' 
and sisters' ages and their order of birth. When we find that they do not know 
their own mother's Christian name correctly, we need not be surprised that they 
contradict each other's statements as to the relative ages or even as to the numbers 
of their brothers and sisters. This especially will be the case in people of this 
class when the youngest is born 25 to 28 years later than the eldest. Unfortunately 
the Church baptismal registers appear equally chaotic; they make no pretence to 
identify father and mother by the same names in two successive years ! On the 
whole there is a reasonable agreement in the two accounts. Those who have 
studied such families as those in the G* and ^.-pedigrees of Lobster-claw, must 
earnestly wish for some immediate step to be taken to restrict the propagation 
of the physically defective ; it is no less urgent than the restriction of the 
propagation of the mentally defective. 
* We have further evidence that in the G. -family there has also been a considerable number 
of births of deformed individuals in the last five years, and a similar experience has arisen in the 
case of a number of pedigrees of hereditary deformity recently brought up to date by the Eugenics 
Laboratory staff. 
