aving a feeble-minded
child. These relationships of feeble-mindedness have been clearly
brought out in an important investigation by Davenport and Weeks
(_Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease_, November, 1911), who have for
the first time succeeded in obtaining a large number of really thorough
and precise pedigrees of such cases.

[33] It may be as well to point out once more that the possibility of
such limited depreciation must not be construed into the statement that
there has been any general "degeneration of the race." It maybe added
that the notion that the golden age lay in the past, and that our own
age is degenerate is not confined to a few biometricians of to-day; it
has commended itself to uncritical minds in all ages, even the greatest,
as far back as we can go. Montesquieu referred to this common notion
(and attempted to explain it) in his _Pensees Diverses_: "Men have such
a bad opinion of themselves," he adds, "that they have believed not only
that their minds and souls were degenerate, but even their bodies, and
that they were not so tall as the men of previous ages." It is thus
quite logically that we arrive at the belief that when mankind first
appeared, "there were giants on the earth in those days," and that Adam
lived to the age of nine hundred and thirty. Evidently no syndromes of
degenerescence there!

[34] The Superintendent of a large State School for delinquent girls in
America (as quoted in the Chicago Vice Commission's Report on _The
Social Evil in Chicago_, p. 229) says: "The girls who come to us
possessed of normal brain power, or not infected with venereal disease,
we look upon as a prize indeed, and we seldom fail to make a woman worth
while of a really normal girl, whatever her environment has been. But we
have failed in numberless cases where the environment has been all
right, but the girl was born wrong."

[35] See e.g. Havelock Ellis, _The Criminal_, 4th ed., 1910, chap IV.

[36] R.L. Dugdale, _The Jukes_, 4th ed., 1910. It is noteworthy that
Dugdale, who wrote nearly forty years ago, was concerned to prove the
influence of bad environment rather than of bad heredity. At that time
the significance of heredity was scarcely yet conceived. It remains
true, however, that bad heredity and bad environment constantly work
together for evil.

[37] Joerger, _Archiv fuer Rassen-und Gesellschafts-Biologie_, 1905, p.
294. Criminal families are also recorded by Aubry, _La Contagion du
Meu