Inquiries into human faculty and its developmentGalton, Francis
Science
Inquiries into human faculty and its development
Galton, Francis
Ability; Eugenics
[Footnote 26: "Seventh Annual Report of Registrar-General."]
[Footnote 27: Healthy Districts Life Table, by Dr. Farr. _Phil
Trans. Royal Society_, 1859.]
(C) The comparison we seek is between the total families produced by
an equal number of urban and rural women who had survived the age of
24. Many of these women will not marry at all; I postpone that
consideration to the next paragraph. Many of the rest will die
before they reach the age of 40, and more of them will die in the
town than in the country. It appears from data furnished by the
above-mentioned tables, that if 100 women of the age of 24 had
annually been added to a population, the number of those so added,
living between the ages of 24 and 40 (an interval of seventeen years)
would be 1539 under the conditions of life in Manchester, and 1585
under those of the healthy districts. Therefore the small factors to
be applied respectively to the two cases, on account of this
correction, are 1539/(17 × 100) and 1585/(17 × 100).
(D) I have no trustworthy data for the relative prevalence of
celibacy in town and country. All that I have learned from the
census returns is, that when searching them for the 1000 families,
131 bachelors were noted between the ages of 24 and 40, among the
factory hands, and 144 among the agricultural labourers. If these
figures be accepted as correct guides to the amount of celibacy
among the women, it would follow that I must be considered to have
discussed the cases of 1131 factory, and 1144 agricultural women,
when dealing with those of 1000 mothers in either class.
Consequently that the respective corrections to be applied, are
given by the factors 1000/1131 and 1000/1141 or 88.4/1000 and 87.6/
1000. This difference of less than 1 per cent, is hardly worth
applying, moreover I do not like to apply it, because it seems to me
erroneous and to act in the wrong direction, inasmuch as unmarried
women can obtain employment more readily in the town than in the
country, and celibacy is therefore more likely to be common in the
former than in the latter.
(E) The possible difference in the length of an urban and rural
generation must not be forgotten. We, however, have reason to
believe that the correction on this ground will be insignificant,
because the length of a generation is found to be constant under
very different circumstances of race, and therefore we should expect
it to be equally constant in the same race under different conditions;
such as it is, it would probably tell against the towns.
Let us now sum up the results. The corrections are not to be applied
for (D) and (E), so we have only to regard (A) × (B) × (C), that
this--
2681 × 74/100 × 1539/1700 1796 77
------------------------- = ---- = --
2911 × 86/100 × 1585/1700 2334 100
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