Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/181

Rh for Harvard and Bowdoin, respectively, must be compared with the number of surviving children for the native American population of the state of Massachusetts, which is 1.9, less, according to my own observations.

Less than 2 surviving offspring to reproduce the race for all native American marriages, 3.1 for those of the limited group of college graduates!

This indicates a remarkable change since the days of Benjamin Franklin, who tells us that 'one and all considered each married couple in this country produced 8 children.' Though this is not a conclusion drawn from statistical study, it is yet indicative, and in harmony with my own deduction from genealogical records. Whatever the precise figures be, all observations agree as to the high fecundity of the American colonies, and tell of the great change which has taken place in one short century.

From conditions better than those in any other country, five and more children to the family, such as led to the Malthusian theory of superfecundation and to the fear of over population of the earth's surface, we have passed in hardly one hundred years to our present condition, with a fecundity for the native-born below that of any other country, such that the American race is unable to reproduce itself with a birth rate of 17 per 1,000 population, hardly 3 children to the family!

These facts I first presented in 1901, with records up to the end