NATURAL SELECTION

There is some small consolation in the most recent birthrate statistics compiled by Mr. John C. Phillips in the current issue of the Harvard Graduates Magazine under the heading "Success and the Birth-Rate". After numerous surveys of broad cross sections of the population the tabulated results have inevitably pointed to a depressing state of race suicide among the classes best fitted sociologically. Mr. Phillips in his most recent study of the question advances along somewhat different lines, aiming at reproduction rates within one particular occupational group, --namely three graduating classes of Harvard College, 1899, 1900, and 1991. His findings, then, offer no hope in an alarming situation of increasing sterility among the college graduate class, but they do indicate some very significant and happy trends in the fecundity--rate operations of this particular group.

For the purpose of proving his thesis, Mr. Phillips first makes a careful classification of his group, dividing it into five classes "according to the varying degrees of success in their life careers." Group one, after the final selective process has been carried out, is made up of men who have excelled unmistakably and whose intellectual powers approach genius. Group two is composed of distincly high-grade men who have no attained true eminence; Group three might be said to hold the Average Man, not good, not bad; Group four is made up largely of the "unfortunates," who through ill health, lack of means, or absence of a normal endowment of native ability rather than the will to succeed, have prevented them shaping their careers satisfactorily; and Group five is reserved for "misfits", actual failures, and "undesirables".

The results of a thorough investigation of these specimens, too full to set down here, are clear-cut and conclusive, and show beyond question a higher birth-rate, marrage rate, and fecundity-rate, among the more successful classes, which points to numerical triumph over the less successful ones in the matter of reproduction. Groups one and two produce roughly on the average of twice s many children as Groups your and five.

The conclusion to be drawn from this extremely valuable study is important and of an optimistic nature. It explodes partially at least the long-standing theory that degenerate strains are invariably more prolific than classes more healthy morally and physically. In short it points toward a new method in the study of eugenics.