Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/137

Rh in it amongst groups, have given some students the impression that intellect, at least, is, by natural necessity, inversely correlated with fecundity.

It is hard to find the facts by which to either verify or refute the notion, current in superficial discussions of human nature and institutions, that such is the case. Sad testimony to man's neglect of the question which of all questions perhaps concerns him most—the simple question of which men and women produce the men and women of the future—is given by the fact that almost no clear and reliable evidence is available concerning the relations of fecundity to intellect, morality, energy, or balance. The most significant evidence is that collected by Woods in the case of royal families. Woods gives the number of children living till 21 in the case of each individual of the royal families which he studied. From them I have made the summaries noted on Charts 7 and 8. Each of these sets of facts is of course the

result of the constitutional fecundity of the women in question plus certain very intricate cooperating circumstances; and neither can be taken at its face-value. What the birth rate would have been had the constitutional capacity of each woman worked under equal conditions, can only be dubiously inferred. My own inference from relevant facts concerning the studies of differentiated birth rates with which I am acquainted is that morality, mental health, energy, and intellect perpetuate a family, and that wherever the really better, or saner, or stronger, or more gifted, classes fail to equal the really worse, ill balanced, feeble or stupid classes, it is a consequence of unfortunate circumstances and customs which are avoidable and which it is the business of human policy to avoid. Society may choose to breed from the bottom, but it does not have to.

No great ingenuity or care then seems necessary to make fairly rapid