W. S. Rankin[122] tells how he applies vital statistics to sick towns or cities in a way to first restore consciousness by telling them just where they stand relatively with regard to death rates and second to bring about reforms. He has various charts and diagrams. The opinion of prominent people in every community is, in general, that their health conditions are good, but when asked what the death rate is they can give no answer. One community compelled a railroad to build and maintain an expensive overhead bridge at a cost of $1,500 a year to prevent one death and the aldermen appropriated only $150 to prevent fifty deaths. The first thing in treating sick social organisms is to restore consciousness. Alexander Graham Bell[123] in the study of a family which is almost classic found that the average duration of life was 34.6 years; 35.2 per cent of these persons died before they were 20 years of age, and 7.3 per cent lived to be 80 or older. A second danger period was found in adolescence, ending at 23. Both sexes showed an increase of deaths during adolescence. More females than males lived to be 95. But the fathers, on the average, lived longer than the mothers and the children born between four and eight years after the marriage of their parents lived longer than those born later. Those who live to be old come from long-lived parents. The long-lived seem to inherit disease-resisting qualities and also are more fecund than the short-lived. He says[124] that in this family mothers who lived to extreme old age had, on the average, larger families than those who died earlier in life, for example, those who died before forty had, on the average, only three to four children apiece. The long-lived proportion is practically doubled when one parent lives to be old and quadrupled when both parents do so. The people who lived to be old represented the disease-resistant strain of their generation and on account of their superior fecundity this quality is distributed largely throughout the population. “A very large proportion of each generation is sprung from a very small proportion of the preceding generation; namely, from the people who lived to old age. The members of the short-lived group come from the short-lived parents. The children of the long-lived parents are on the average stronger, more vigorous, and longer-lived than the children of others, and there were more of them per family.”