Eugenics Laboratory Memoirs

The Francis Galton Laboratory is issuing in parts at short intervals a collection of published and unpublished family pedigrees, illustrating the inheritance in man of mental and physical characters, of disease and of abnormality.

Students of heredity find great difficulty in obtaining easy access to material bearing on human inheritance. The published material is voluminous, scattered over a wide and often very inaccessible journalistic area. The already collected although unpublished material is probably as copious, but no central organ for its rapid publication in a standardized form exists at present. The Eugenics Laboratory alone possesses several hundred pedigrees of family characteristics and diseases which it is desirable to make readily accessible. Many medical men possess similar material, and there is a growing desire among genealogists to pay more attention to family characters and supplement the merely nominal pedigrees current in the past.

For a publication of this kind to be successful at the present time, it should be entirely free from controversial matter. The Treasury of Human Inheritance will therefore contain no reference to theoretical opinions. It will give in a standardized form the pedigree of each stock. This will be accompanied by a few pages of text describing the individual members of the stock, giving references to authorities, and, if the material has been published, to the locus of original publication. When necessary the characteristic will be illustrated by photography or radiography. In this way, it is hoped in the course of a few years to place a large mass of material in the hands of the student of human heredity. It will not cut him off from, but directly guide him to, original and fuller sources of information. Further, the Treasury will provide students of eugenics and of sociology, medical men, and others, with an organ where their investigations will find ready publication, and where as time goes on a higher and more complete standard of family history than has hitherto been usual can be maintained. It is proposed to issue the Treasury of Human Inheritance in quarto parts at about quarterly intervals. Each part will contain about 6 to 10 plates of pedigrees and of such other illustrations as may be needful.

The following parts have already been issued :—

Parts I and II (double part) contains pedigrees of Diabetes Insipidus, Split-Foot, Polydactylism, Brachydactylism, Tuberculosis, Deaf-Mutism, and Legal Ability. Price 148.

Part III contains pedigrees of Angioneurotic Oedema, Hermaphroditism, Deaf-Mutism, Insanity, and Commercial Ability. Price 68.

Part IV is just ready, and will contain pedigrees of Hare Lip, Cleft Palate, Deaf-Mutism, and Congenital Cataract. Price 108.

The subscription to each set of four parts is 20s., and all communications with regard to pedigree contributions should be sent to: The Editors, Treasury of Human Inheritance, Eugenics Laboratory, University College, London, W.C. Subscriptions should be made payable to Miss Ethel M. Elderton, at the above address.

Single parts may be purchased from Messrs. Dulau & Co., Ltd., 37 Soho Square, London, W., either directly or through any bookseller.

THE INFLUENCE OF DEFECTIVE PHYSIQUE AND UNFAVOURABLE HOME ENVIRONMENT ON THE INTELLIGENCE OF SCHOOL CHILDREN

(1) INTRODUCTORY.

THE object of the present memoir is twofold: (a) to illustrate the difficulties that arise in attempting to make reliable and comparable observations on school children; and (b) to indicate the difficulties met with in the statistical treatment of such observations, if they are not made with due regard to the needs of the statistician.

The medical inspection of school children is now a recognized feature of our social life. We have high hopes of what it may effect in the future; but if it is not to disappoint us, if the harvest is to be worth the labour and its cost, we must definitely settle what we expect to learn from it and what we hope to do for the children by its aid. We shall be bitterly disappointed if we anticipate that definite results can be obtained by merely amassing data without much careful thought. We must determine first of all what are the right lines of inquiry and how best to standardize medical inspection and especially the teachers' powers of observation. Above all, we have to remember that the real complexities of the problems before us are very far from being realized at the present time.

Great Britain is a country of many "local races". Such characters of children as stature and weight vary from local race to local race precisely as eye and hair colours do. In the schools of a large town it is quite usual to find significant pigmentation differences in the different districts. No instructed student of anthropometry attributes these differences to the effects of environment; they are due, he knows well, to different racial proportions in the different districts; the Irish, the Jewish, the Scandinavian, and the Anglo-Saxon elements are there in varying proportions, and in many big towns even a study of the children's names is sufficient to show the varying proportions of these or other races.

Now stature and weight are as markedly differentiated among these racial types as are hair colour, eye colour, or shape of head. What is more, their eyesight, their hearing, and their standard of clothing are often widely differentiated as well. No study of the physique of the school child will be of service unless it is associated with some determination of the racial elements in the schools under

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