In our Northwest many Scandinavians board up or nail down their windows for the winter, and in such homes one appreciates the _mot_ evoked by the query, "Why is the country air so pure?" The answer is, "Because the farmers keep all the bad air shut up in their houses." The second generation are taking to ventilation, and in their children very likely the Hyperboreans' horror of fresh air will have wholly disappeared, and with it their special susceptibility to the white plague. The study of several thousand mixed marriages in Minneapolis has led Professor Albert Jenks of the University of Minnesota to this conclusion: "The Irish blood tends to increase fecundity, and the Scandinavian blood tends to decrease fecundity, of other peoples in amalgamation." Is this contrast due to the Scandinavians being so fore-looking, whereas the Irish give little heed to the future; to the fact that the Scandinavians are the purest Protestants, while the Irish are the purest Roman Catholics; or to the coming together in the Scandinavians of prudence and Protestantism with a high status of women? At any rate, such caution in family is startling when one recalls that old Scandinavia was the mother hive of the swarms of barbarians that kept South Europeans in dread a thousand years, or notes what William Penn found among the Swedes on the Delaware two hundred and thirty years ago: "They have fine children and almost every house full; rare to find one of them without three or four boys and as many girls; some six, seven, or eight sons." The primitive man commits crime from passion; the developed man commits more of his crimes from cupidity. Proverbially honest, the Scandinavian is less prone than the American to seek his living by crookedness. The gamut of exploit that reaches from the _Artful Dodger_ to _Colonel Sellers_ is alien to him. Nor is he subject to the wild impulses that often crop out in the Italian or the Slav. Much of his crime springs from disorderly conduct, and drink must bear most of the blame, for on the Scandinavian nature liquor has a disastrous effect. ALCOHOLISM AMONG THE SCANDINAVIANS