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Eugenics is chiefly valuable in its negative aspects. It is "negative Eugenics" that has studied the histories of such families as the Jukeses and the Kallikaks, that has pointed out the network of imbecility and feeble-mindedness that has been sedulously spread through all strata of society. On its so-called positive or constructive side, it fails to awaken any permanent interest.
The newer economists are beginning to recognize that their science heretofore failed to take into account the most vital factors in modern industry it failed to foresee the inevitable consequences of compulsory motherhood; the catastrophic effects of child labor upon racial health; the overwhelming importance of national vitality and well-being; the international ramifications of the population problem; the relation of indiscriminate breeding to feeble-mindedness, and industrial inefficiency.
He recognizes HEREDITY as its principal source, i. e. he recognizes feeble-mindedness as a stage of mentality already existing and transmissible by the ordinary mechanism of heredity, but does not attempt further to account for it, either as a survival or as an atavism.
Ordinary forms of degeneracy that are well recognized are feeble-mindedness, chronic insanity, chronic epilepsy, congenital deaf-mutism, habitual pauperism, and the like. Now there can be no doubt that criminality in some of its forms is related to these functional forms of degeneracy.
One of the most significant revelations of this table is the range of feeble-mindedness gradually ascending from the smallest percentage, in the most populous county of the state, to the largest percentages, in the two most remote and thinly populated counties.
It is her business to discover feeble-mindedness, to test school children, and inmates of institutions to which they have been sent, or of places to which they have gone because of incapacity or delinquency or sin of any sort; and nothing I have read in books has been so revealing concerning conditions that exist as her frank statements simply told.
If the Mendelian law held good in this regard, from a union of a defective and a normal person, three out of four would be normal, but as a matter of fact, the percentage of normal is no doubt much greater. It is only when both father and mother are feeble-minded that feeble-mindedness is sure to show in the offspring.
It is among the specimens of normality of the brain cells that we may look for our examples of endocrine mental deficiency. Included are all sorts of examples of feeble-mindedness varying from the moron to the imbecile and idiot, arrested brain life. The cretin is the classic type of mental deficiency due to endocrine insufficiency, curable or improvable by the proper handling.
Goddard's findings as regards feeble-mindedness fit in perfectly with this scheme. That Goddard was unaware of it when his conclusions were reached is all the more evidence of their soundness because it shows that they were reached independently.
Neither did he die an old man, to whom the adherents of monism would certainly have the effrontery to impute feeble-mindedness, but at the early age of forty-six years. The other point of which we must treat here, is the manner in which, after the example of Dr. Reh, Schmidt attempts in the "Umschau" to exonerate Haeckel in the matter of the "History of the three cliches."
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