CHAPTER XX
EUGENICS AND EUTHENICS
Emphasis has been given, in several of the foregoing chapters, to the
desirability of inheriting a good constitution and a high degree of
vigor and disease-resistance. It has been asserted that no measures of
hygiene and sanitation can take the place of such inheritance. It is now
desirable to ascertain the limits within which good inheritance is
effective, and this may be conveniently done by a study of the lives of
a group of people who inherited exceptionally strong physical
constitutions.
The people referred to are taken from a collection of histories of long
life made by the Genealogical Record Office of Washington.[189] One
hundred individuals were picked out at random, each of whom had died at
the age of 90 or more, and with the record of each individual were
placed those of all his brothers and sisters. Any family was rejected in
which there was a record of wholly accidental death (e.g., families of
which a member had been killed in the Civil War). The 100 families, or
more correctly fraternities or sibships, were classified by the number
of children per fraternity, as follows:
Number of Total number
Number of children per of children
fraternities fraternity in group
1 2 2
11 3 33
8 4 32
17 5 85
13 6 78
14 7 98
9 8 72
11 9 99
10 10 100
3 11 33
2 12 24
1 13 13
--- ---
100 669
The average at death of these 669 persons was 64.
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