The Project Gutenberg EBook of Consanguineous Marriages in the American
Population, by George B. Louis Arner

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Title: Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population

Author: George B. Louis Arner

Release Date: July 20, 2004 [EBook #12955]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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CONSANGUINEOUS MARRIAGES
IN THE
AMERICAN POPULATION

STUDIES IN HISTORY, ECONOMICS AND PUBLIC LAW

EDITED BY THE FACULTY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

[Volume XXXI] [Number 3]

CONSANGUINEOUS MARRIAGES
IN THE
AMERICAN POPULATION

BY
GEORGE B. LOUIS ARNER, Ph.D.
_University Fellow in Sociology_

1908

PREFACE

This monograph does not claim to treat exhaustively, nor to offer a
final solution of all the problems which have been connected with the
marriage of kin. The time has not yet come for a final work on the
subject, for the systematic collection of the necessary statistics,
which can only be done by governmental authority, has never been
attempted. The statistics which have been gathered, and which are
presented in the following pages, are fragmentary, and usually bear
upon single phases of the subject, but taken together they enable us
better to understand many points which have long been in dispute.

The need for statistics of the frequency of occurrence of
consanguineous marriages has been strongly felt by many far-sighted
men. G.H. Darwin and A.H. Huth have tried unsuccessfully to have the
subject investigated by the British Census, and Dr. A.G. Bell has
recently urged that the United States Census make such an
investigation.[1] Another motive for undertaking this present work,
aside from the desire to study the problems already referred to, has
been to test the widely prevalent theory that consanguinity is a
factor in the determination of sex, the sole basis of which seems to
be the Prussian birth statistics of Duesing, which are open to other
interpretations.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Bell, "A Few Thoughts Concerning Eugenics." In
_National Geographic