Hansford: Mental Defectives in County Indiana 143 
who are not feeble-minded, but who have intelligence quotients 
somewhere in 70. Among the feeble-minded there is one I.Q. 
of 42, 5 somewhere in 50, and 4 in 60. Thus among the 
young descendants of the Davis family are 11 defectives of 
whom we know besides a large number who probably carry 
an inferior heredity which they will transmit to the next gen- 
eration. 
The 6 feeble-minded children in the Ripple Creek School 
are cousins related to a large group of epileptic, insane, and 
feeble-minded persons, all of whom are the descendants of 
Mark Allen. This Allen came into County H. in the early 
days and settled among the hills on Ripple Creek while his 
neighbors, whose descendants are now among the leading citi- 
zens of the county, took up the fertile farming land. Here as 
in other cases the inferior stock has not only been pushed into 
the hills early in the history of the county, but it has been 
kept there by the more complex environment on the outside. 
In this little community, this family has intermarried with 2 
or 3 similar ones who have also been pushed back among the 
hills until at the present time practically all the residents of 
this bit of rough land are related and we find their children 
making up the list of mental defectives in the district school. 
The above cases are examples of what can be found in 
every rural school in the county: namely, that the largest 
number of retarded and defective school children is to be 
found in the hilly isolated districts and the smallest number 
is found in the rich fertile parts of the county, and the few 
defectives found in the latter group are not native to the com- 
munity but are the children of tenants and ne’er-do-well la- 
borers. The 3 main reasons for this are the same 3 mentioned 
before in connection with the total number of defectives 
among the hills as compared with the number in the fertile 
farming country. 
(1) It is probably true that in the isolated unfertile rural 
districts the stock has always been inferior and in some in- 
stances this is a demonstrable fact. It will be remembered 
that in Township 11, there is a degenerate group (the Allen 
family) which is scattered over 2 districts and that the vari- 
ous branches of this family, the Storen, Allen, Bell, Smith, 
and Coopers, have for the most part stayed in the rough land 
where they have barely been able to make a living. In the 
