to be
extended. Some States have gone so far as to sterilize the unfit, that
they may not by any chance exercise the powers of parenthood; it is
urged in many quarters that clergymen require a medical certificate of
good health before sanctioning marriage.

50. =Family Degeneracy.=--Several impressive illustrations have been
published of degenerate families that show the far-reaching effects of
heredity. In contrast to these pictures, has been set the life story
of families who have won renown in successive generations because of
unusual ability. Nothing so effective is presented by any argument as
that of concrete cases. Perhaps the best known of these stories is
that of the Jukes family. About the middle of the eighteenth century a
normal man with a coarse, lazy vein in his nature built himself a hut
in the woods of central New York. In five generations he had several
hundred descendants. A study of twelve hundred persons who belonged
to the family by kinship or marriage was made carefully, with the
following findings. Nearly all of the family were lazy, ignorant, and
coarse. Four hundred were physically diseased by their own fault. Two
hundred were criminals; seven of them murderers. Fifty of the women
were notoriously immoral. Three hundred of the children died from
inherited weakness or neglect. More than three hundred members of the
family were chronic paupers. It is estimated that they cost the State
a thousand dollars apiece for pauperism and crime.

Another family called the Kallikak family, which has been made the
subject of investigation, is a still better example of heredity. The
family was descended from a Revolutionary soldier, who had an
illegitimate feeble-minded son by an imbecile young woman. The line
continued by feeble-minded descent and marriage until four hundred and
eighty descendants have been traced. Of these one hundred and
forty-three were positively defective, thirty-six were illegitimate,
thirty-three sexually immoral, mostly prostitutes, eight kept houses
of ill repute, three were criminal, twenty-four were confirmed
drunkards, and eighty-two died in infancy.

On the other hand, there are striking examples of what good birth and
breeding can do. It happened that the ancestor of the Kallikak family,
after he had sown his wild oats, married well and had about five
hundred descendants. All of them were normal, only two were alcoholic,
and one sexually loose. The family has been prominent s