ious. Certainly no one would suppose that a man selects
his wife deliberately because her eye color matches his own; much less
would he select her on the basis of resemblance in longevity, which can
not be known until after both are dead.

Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones explain such selection by the supposition
that a man's ideal of everything that is lovely in womankind is based on
his mother. During his childhood, her attributes stamp themselves on his
mind as being the perfect attributes of the female sex; and when he
later falls in love it is natural that the woman who most attracts him
should be one who resembles his mother. But as he, because of heredity,
resembles his mother, there is thus a resemblance between husband and
wife. Cases where there is no resemblance would, on this hypothesis,
either be not love matches, or else be cases where the choice was made
by the woman, not the man. Proof of this hypothesis has not yet been
furnished, but it may very well account for some part of the assortative
mating which is so nearly universal.

The eugenic significance of assortative mating is obvious. Marriage of
representatives of two long-lived strains ensures that the offspring
will inherit more longevity than does the ordinary man. Marriage of two
persons from gifted families will endow the children with more than the
ordinary intellect. On the other hand, marriage of two members of
feeble-minded strains (a very common form of assortative mating) results
in the production of a new lot of feeble-minded children, while marriage
contracted between families marked by criminality or alcoholism means
the perpetuation of such traits in an intensified form. For alcoholism,
Charles Goring found the resemblance between husband and wife in the
following classes to be as follows:

Very poor and destitute .44
Prosperous poor .58
Well-to-do .69

The resemblance of husband and wife, in respect of possession of a
police record, he found to be .20. Of course alcoholism and criminality
are not wholly due to heredity; the resemblance between man and wife is
partly a matter of social influences. But in any case the existence of
assortative mating for such traits is significant.

3. Preferential mating occurs when certain classes of women are
discriminated against by the average man, or by men as a class; or _vice
versa_. It is the form of sexual selection made prominent by Charles
Darwin,