207 
oj Edinburgh, Session 1878-79. 
of those marriages that may be expected to be unfruitful. Doing 
this for each age, and adding the products together in quinquennial 
groups, we get the following comparison of the expected and actual 
number of unfruitful marriages, the agreement between the results 
affording a very complete test of the goodness of the adjustment. 
Ages. 
Number of Unfruitful Marriages. 
Actual. 
Expected. 
40-44 
36 
36-2 
45-49 
20 
19-8 
50-54 
16 
16*5 
55-59 
26 
25-1 
60-64 
19 
18-5 
65-69 
10 
10-0 
70-74 
7 
6-9 
75-79 
3 
2-8 
Total 
137 
135-8 
I will not attempt to discuss the various points on which the 
fruitfulness of a marriage depends. The most important of them 
is clearly the age of the wife ; and consistently with this, we see that 
the probability of a marriage being unfruitful, increases with great 
rapidity between the ages of 50 and 60 ; obviously because a much 
larger proportion of the wives married by men of these ages are past 
child-bearing than is the case with those married by men under 50. 
It is but very rarely that the information available to the public 
will enable us to form even a reasonable conjecture whether the 
absence of issue of a marriage is attributable to the husband or to 
the wife, but such cases do occasionally occur. For instance, when 
a man marries a widow of 30 who has already had several children, 
it may fairly be inferred that it is the fault of the husband if there 
are no children born of her second marriage. So, again, if there are 
no children born of a marriage, the wife dies, and the husband then 
marries a second time and has a family, it may fairly be inferred 
that the absence of children of the first marriage was not attributable 
to him. It is obvious that cases of this kind are so very few that 
we cannot attempt to base any general reasoning upon them, nor is 
it all necessary that we should do so. 
VOL. x. 
z 
