Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 80.djvu/494

490 Goring considers that assortative mating is a factor of greater importance in the upper than in the lower social classes. In his records for insanity in criminals, he finds an assortative mating +.35 for the "well-to-do and prosperous poor" while it is probably absent in the "very poor and destitute."

To mark off sharply social attributes from those which are physical and psychical is as impossible as it is idle. Certain traits dependent on wealth, family history, education or opportunity may be, for convenience merely, designated as social. To what extent do they influence mating?

Their potency is greatest in caste, royalty and peerage. Even in countries which pride themselves on the absence of social strata, wealth, family pride and feuds, religion and education, play their part in limiting the range of choice in marriage selection. But nowhere is mating within the class universal. The much-multiplied American dollar plays havoc with continental pedigrees. The pure breeding of the English nobility is a pretence; "the lawyer, the farmer, the silk mercer lies perdu under the coronet, and winks to the antiquary to say nothing." Some day the weight of these social forces will be determined, but the proper kinds of facts are not yet available.

Alcoholism is one of those interesting cases in which direct personal or social influence may supplement and reinforce the resemblance possibly due to assortative mating. Goring, dividing his material for English criminals into three classes for social status, finds these coefficients of resemblance: