_Pauperism and Degeneracy._ In order to see more clearly the biological roots of dependence we must notice briefly the relation of habitual pauperism to degeneracy. Studies like that made by Dr. Dugdale of the Jukes family show that unquestionably there is in many instances a close relation between habitual pauperism of various types and degeneracy. Out of 709 in the Jukes family studied by Dugdale 500 had been aided. Pauperism was 7 1_2 times as common among the Jukes as in the ordinary population. Along with the pauperism of the Jukes went prostitution, illegitimacy, crime, and physical disease and defects. Many other studies have shown the same intimate relation between physical degeneracy and habitual dependence or pauperism. There can be no doubt, therefore, that general physical degeneracy, or biological unfitness, is, as we have already asserted in the beginning, a conspicuous factor in the worst cases of chronic pauperism. _The Influence of Heredity upon Pauperism_. Similar studies to those already mentioned have shown that dependence is often times hereditary in families from generation to generation. This is doubtless based upon the inheritance of physical and mental defects. Indirectly, therefore, there is such a thing as hereditary pauperism. Now we know from the labors of Weismann that acquired characteristics are not inherited, but only congenital, or inborn characteristics. It is not the characteristics, in other words, which are acquired from the influence of environment that are transmitted to offspring, but the characteristics that arise through variations in the germ, caused by forces which are not yet well understood. Defects that are acquired by the individual in his lifetime, in other words, will not be transmitted; but the defects that arise through accident or other means in the germ are transmitted. This being so, it follows that acquired pauperism or dependence is not transmitted but only the pauperism which rests upon congenital defects. This is illustrated by the case of the deaf. Deaf-mutes are of two sorts: persons who are born deaf, or the congenital deaf-mutes, and persons who become deaf-mutes through diseases affecting the ear in early childhood. These latter are styled adventitious deaf-mutes. Now when congenital deaf-mutes marry, they show a strong tendency to transmit their defect to offspring, but the children of adventitious deaf-mutes are always normal. Dr. Fay, in his investigations into the marriages of the deaf in the United States shows that only 0.3 per cent of the children born from the marriages of persons adventitiously deaf and having no deaf relatives are born deaf; while on the other hand, 30.3 per cent of the children born from the marriages of persons congenitally deaf, both parents having deaf relatives, are born deaf. In other words, the number of deaf-mutes born where both parents are congenitally deaf and have deaf relatives is one