"The seven children of the eldest son were scattered years ago through the death of their father. They were taken by strangers, and though kept in school, none of them proved capable of advancement. Three at least could not learn to read or handle the smallest quantities. The rest do this with difficulty. All but two are now married and founding the fourth generation of this line. The family of the fourth son are now county charges. Of the 14 children of school age in this and the remaining families, all are greatly retarded. One is an epileptic and at 16 can not read or write. One at 15 is in the third reader and should be set down as defective. The remainder are from one to four years retarded. "There is nothing striking in the annals of this family. It comes as near the lowest margin of human existence as possible and illustrates how marked defect may sometimes exist without serious results in the infringement of law and custom. Its serious menace, however, lies in the certain marriage into stocks which are no better, and the production of large families which continue to exist on the same level of semi-dependency. In place of the two dependents of a generation ago we now find in the third generation 32 descendants who bid fair to continue their existence on the same plane--certainly an enormous multiplication of the initial burden of expense."[75] From cases of this sort, which represent the least striking kind of bad breeding, the student may pass through many types up to the great tribes of Jukes, Nams, Kallikaks, Zeros, Dacks, Ishmaels, Sixties, Hickories, Hill Folk, Piney Folk, and the rest, with which the readers of the literature of restrictive eugenics are familiar. It is abundantly demonstrated that much, if not most, of their trouble is the outcome of bad heredity. Indeed, when a branch of one of these clans is transported, or emigrates, to a wholly new environment, it soon creates for itself, in many cases, an environment similar to that from which it came. Whether it goes to the city, or to the agricultural districts of the west, it may soon manage to reestablish the debasing atmosphere to which it has always been accustomed.[76] Those who see in improvement of the environment the cure for all such plague spots as these tribes inhabit, overlook the fact that man largely creates his own environment. The story of the tenement-dwellers who were supplied with bath tubs but refused to use them for any other purpose than to store coal, exemplifies a wide range of facts.