difficulties of the investigation. It is, however, easy to show that
the criminal nature tends to be inherited; while, on the other hand,
it is impossible that women who spend a large portion of the best
years of their life in prison can contribute many children to the
population. The true state of the case appears to be that the
criminal population receives steady accessions from those who,
without having strongly-marked criminal natures, do nevertheless
belong to a type of humanity that is exceedingly ill suited to play
a respectable part in our modern civilisation, though it is well
suited to flourish under half-savage conditions, being naturally
both healthy and prolific. These persons are apt to go to the bad;
their daughters consort with criminals and become the parents of
criminals. An extraordinary example of this is afforded by the
history of the infamous Jukes family in America, whose pedigree has
been made out, with extraordinary care, during no less than seven
generations, and is the subject of an elaborate memoir printed in
the Thirty-first Annual Report of the Prison Association of New York,
1876. It includes no less than 540 individuals of Jukes blood, of
whom a frightful number degraded into criminality, pauperism, or
disease.

It is difficult to summarise the results in a few plain figures, but
I will state those respecting the fifth generation, through the
eldest of the five prolific daughters of the man who is the common
ancestor of the race. The total number of these was 123, of whom
thirty-eight came through an illegitimate granddaughter, and
eighty-five through legitimate grandchildren. Out of the thirty-eight,
sixteen have been in jail, six of them for heinous offences, one of
these having been committed no less than nine times; eleven others
led openly disreputable lives or were paupers; four were notoriously
intemperate; the history of three had not been traced, and only four
are known to have done well. The great majority of the women
consorted with criminals. As to the eighty-five legitimate
descendants, they were less flagrantly bad, for only five of them
had been in jail, and only thirteen others had been paupers. Now the
ancestor of all this mischief, who was born about the year 1730, is
described as having been a jolly companionable man, a hunter, and a
fisher, averse to steady labour, but working hard and idling by turns,
and who had numerous illegitimate children, whose issue has not