A Civic Biology, Presented in ProblemsHunter, George W. (George William)
Science
A Civic Biology, Presented in Problems
Hunter, George W. (George William)
Biology; Sanitation
The Jukes.--Studies have been made on a number of different families in
this country, in which mental and moral defects were present in one or both
of the original parents. The "Jukes" family is a notorious example. The
first mother is known as "Margaret, the mother of criminals." In
seventy-five years the progeny of the original generation has cost the
state of New York over a million and a quarter of dollars, besides giving
over to the care of prisons and asylums considerably over a hundred
feeble-minded, alcoholic, immoral, or criminal persons. Another case
recently studied is the "Kallikak" family.[35] This family has been traced
back to the War of the Revolution, when a young soldier named Martin
Kallikak seduced a feeble-minded girl. She had a feeble-minded son from
whom there have been to the present time 480 descendants. Of these 33 were
sexually immoral, 24 confirmed drunkards, 3 epileptics, and 143
_feeble-minded_. The man who started this terrible line of immorality and
feeble-mindedness later married a normal Quaker girl. From this couple a
line of 496 descendants have come, with _no_ cases of feeble-mindedness.
The evidence and the moral speak for themselves!
Footnote 35: The name Kallikak is fictitious.
Parasitism and its Cost to Society.--Hundreds of families
such as those described above exist to-day, spreading disease,
immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to
society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals
or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families
have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others
by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually
protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely
for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from
society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.
The Remedy.--If such people were lower animals, we would
probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity
will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the
sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing
intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and
degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully
in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country.
Blood Tells.--Eugenics show us, on the other hand, in a study
of the families in which are brilliant men and women, the fact that
the descendants have received the _good_ inheritance from their
ancestors. The following, taken from Davenport's _Heredity in
Relation to Eugenics_, illustrates how one family has been famous
in American History.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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