Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/528

524 If we assume the unspecified addition to average one and a half children we find that the 242 marriages have yielded, or are intended to yield, a total of 619 children and an average of 2.56 children per marriage.

If we take the typical decade 1890-99 we get the following results:

This gives 118 living children (excluding deaths of any after five years) and 12 or 13 expected, whilst in 11 cases unspecified additions to the families are anticipated, and 12 cases are doubtful. If one additional child is allowed for each doubtful case and one and a half for each unspecified case, this would give 159 children as the fruit of 107 marriages and of 211 parents (allowing for second marriages, in which cases only three persons are concerned in two marriages). This indicates that the offspring of each limited marriage (judging from the period named) is almost precisely one and a half children per marriage. The average number of children to be expected from each marriage, in England and Wales twenty-five years ago, was at least three times as great!

Information as to the causes which had led to limitation was not specifically asked for. But in many papers a large number of valuable details were supplied. Taking all the limited marriages (242) we find the causes indicated as follows:

The death of a parent, of course, is a cause of limitation in another sense from that elsewhere employed in this paper.

Analyzing these last again, we find the following causes assigned: