, a public and
most deplorable calamity has descended of late on our own vigorous young
nation, as well as on some older lands, threatening in the not distant
future the extinction of many of its most esteemed families and of what
was, not long ago, a vigorous stock. The following article by Dr. Walter
Lindley, Professor of Gynecology in the University of Southern
California, will explain the matter better than my words could do. It
was read in Los Angeles at a meeting of the Southern Californian Medical
Society in June, 1895, and is printed in the "N. Y. Medical Journal" of
August 17 of the same year (pp. 211 and following). It is headed
"American Sterility;" I will quote freely from it:

"The obstetrician finds his vocation disappearing among the American
women from the face of the earth.

"It is a fact that the American family with more than one or two
children is the exception. From the records of six generations of
families in some New England towns, it was found that the families
comprising the first generation had on an average between eight and ten
children; the next three generations averaged about seven to each
family; the fifth generation less than three to each family. The
generation now on the stage is not doing so well as that. In
Massachusetts the average family numbers less than three persons. In
1885 the census of Massachusetts disclosed that 71.28 per cent of the
women of that State were childless. The census of 1885 in the State of
New York shows that twenty-five per cent of the women of that State are
childless, fifty per cent average less than one child, and seventy-five
per cent average only a trifle over one child.

"Southern California has fully as dark a record as New England--that is,
in the family where the man and wife are American-born. It goes without
saying that the medical profession in this country is composed to a
great extent of typical progressive Americans, and I ask you to make
mental statistics of the children in the families of the physicians in
Southern California, and you will find very few of them containing more
than two.

"Had the Rev. T. R. Malthus lived in the United States to-day, he would
never have argued about the danger of over-population, as he did in his
interesting volume on 'The Principles of Population.'"

After quoting the views of Plato, Aristotle, and Lycurgus, Dr. Lindley
continues: "In Southern California there are, it is true, many children,
but the av