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Recently interest was sharply awakened by the rediscovery of the original Dugdale charts, mislaid for more than thirty years. The search that unearthed them was made at the instigation of the Carnegie Institute. As the charts contain true names of the families investigated by Dugdale, the institute hopes to trace them down to date and show how much more this one feeble-minded stock has cost a State during the past forty years.

Meanwhile a professor of the University of Berne, Switzerland, has traced the heredity of a family descended from a woman who for almost the entire latter half of the eighteenth century had been "a thief, a drunkard, a tramp." Of her 834 descendants 707 have been traced from youth to old age. Of these, 106 were born out of wedlock, 142 were beggars, and 64 more lived on charity. Among the women 181 lived loose lives. There have been 76 convicts in the family and 7 murderers. And this stock also has cost its government during seventy-five years no less than $1,250,000.

There is more evidence, but the need of the moment is not more evidence, but more enlightened public spirit. Many still look upon the village drunkard, the village idiot, the half-witted bound girl, with indulgent tolerance. If the reader wishes to understand what a menace to society all these are, let him read R. L. Dugdale's thin little volume, The Jukes.

Had that book been read, as it could have been, by the good folks in New Jersey that interested themselves in the woman above mentioned, and had they known of her feeble-minded ancestry, they might have avoided the mistake of marrying her to two feebleminded husbands in order to legitimatize the seven of her feeble-minded children that are still at large. They might, perhaps, have seen the tremendous significance of the fact that the birth-rate among the feeble-minded is twice as rapid as among normal persons. The tainted blood of the single degenerate ancestor of the Jukes during seventy-five years ramified into forty-five branches and produced nearly a thousand defectives and delinquents that became charges upon society.

A striking modern instance of this was discovered during the investigation of the heredity of feeble-minded twin boys now in the training-school at Vineland. Their father was found to be of good family. His four sisters, one his twin, were all normal. Being the only surviving boy, he himself had been thoroughly spoiled in his bringing up, and toward maturity he took to drinking and began to degenerate. He married first a normal woman and they had two normal children; for his second wife he took a feeble-minded woman out of the poorhouse. For a time his superior ancestry predominated. Her first child was normal; her second died in infancy; her third was normal; but her fourth was feeble-minded. The man had by this time sunk so low that for his third wife he chose a prostitute. She already had three feeble-minded illegitimate children, and she bore him three more of the same strain, two of whom are the twins at Vineland. It was subsequently discovered that this mother came of a feeble-minded stock of which 319 members have been investigated. Only 42 of them were found normal and 119 are feeble-minded.

With such examples, and there are many of them, showing the down-dragging effect of miscegenation with the feeble-minded, there remains to-day no slightest excuse for the folly of mingling defectives with normal persons in our almshouses, our reformatories, and, worst of all, in our public schools. The advantages of segregation of the abnormal classes, of which the feeble-minded are the most familiar, are obvious, and the specialists are calling loudly for institutions in which to put them. Still more loudly are they calling attention to the fact that a large proportion of these abnormals may have their condition ameliorated by education, provided they are caught young enough.

For this purpose education in the public schools is worse than useless. You may think you are perfectly competent to detect a feeble-minded child. Probably you are, if he or she presents an aggravated case of this malady. There remains what the specialists call " borderland" states, where the subject, because of some hereditary taint, slight, perhaps, or even because of some unfavorable environment, is on the verge of habits that, unless strongly counteracted by a special environment and training, will result at maturity in a condition permanently inimical to society.

Even medical inspection as at present constituted in our public schools is inadequate to detect and remedy these borderland states. Consider the case of Albert. He is a large, strong boy of seventeen. His physical development is about normal for his age. He talks fluently, reads well, and writes a good, flowing business hand. In a good many business houses it would be rather easy for Albert to get a position on the ordinary tests that are applied to youths. But he could not keep it. He had been through the seventh grade in the Philadelphia public schools, and his teachers considered him ready to be promoted to the eighth grade. He uses large words and many of them. He talks about nouns and phrases and that sort of thing. But his parents noticed that, at the age of seventeen, Albert did not know enough to take care of himself when alone in the city, and they sent him to the training-school at Vineland, where he came very near passing all the tests of mentality given him till he came to that of the Binet form-board. This consists in placing certain formed pegs in the holes which fit them. A boy of Albert's age should have done it the first time in about fifteen seconds. It took him forty-eight seconds, and he gave himself away badly by repeatedly trying the oval peg in the oblong hole, the square in the hole for the cross, and the diamond in the hole for the triangle. This test shows more quickly than any other the mental status of a child, and, all things considered, the training-school was obliged to put down seventeen-year-old Albert as of a mental status of nine years.