iculty that occasionally people of the very kind whose production he
most wishes to see encouraged--real geniuses--may carry the taint. The
exaggerated claims of the Italian anthropologist C. Lombroso and his
school, in regard to the close relation between genius and insanity,
have been largely disproved; yet there remains little doubt that the two
sometimes do go together; and such supposed epileptics as Mohammed,
Julius Caesar, and Napoleon will at once be called to mind. To apply
sweeping restrictive measures would prevent the production of a certain
amount of talent of a very high order. The situation can only be met by
dealing with every case on its individual merits, and recognizing that
it is to the interests of society to allow some very superior
individuals to reproduce, even though part of their posterity may be
mentally or physically somewhat unsound.

A field survey in two typical counties of Indiana (1916) showed that
there were 1.8 recognizable epileptics per thousand population. If
these figures should approximately hold good for the entire United
States, the number of epileptics can hardly be put at less than 150,000.
Some of them are not anti-social, but many of them are.

Feeble-mindedness and insanity were also included in the census
mentioned, and the total number of the three kinds of defectives was
found to be 19 per thousand in one county and 11.4 per thousand in the
other. This would suggest a total for the entire United States of
something like one million.

In addition to these well-recognized classes of hopelessly defective,
there is a class of defectives embracing very diverse characteristics,
which demands careful consideration. In it are those who are germinally
physical weaklings or deformed, those born with a hereditary diathesis
or predisposition toward some serious disease (e.g., Huntington's
Chorea), and those with some gross defect of the organs of special
sense. The germinally blind and deaf will particularly occur to mind in
the latter connection. Cases falling in this category demand careful
scrutiny by biological and psychological experts, before any action can
be taken in the interest of eugenics; in many cases the affected
individual himself will be glad to cooeperate with society by remaining
celibate or by the practice of birth control, to the end of leaving no
offspring to bear what he has borne.

Finally, we come to the great class of delinquents who have hitherto
been m