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CHAPTER XIII

a trifle higher than that for Harvard, while the number of childless marriages is slightly less." This is probably owing to the larger proportion of Harvard students living in a large city.

If the birth-rate of graduates both of separate men's colleges and of separate women's colleges is alarmingly low, that of graduates of coeducational institutions is not always satisfactory, either. To some extent the low birth-rate is a characteristic of educated people, without regard to the precise nature of their education. In a study of the graduates of Syracuse University, one of the oldest coeducational colleges of the eastern United States, H. J. Banker found6 that the number of children declined with each decade. Thus married women graduates prior to the Civil War had 2 surviving children each; in the last decade of the nineteenth century they had only one. For married men graduates, the number of surviving children had fallen in the same length of time from 2.62 to 1.38. When all graduates, married or not, are counted in the decade 1892-1901, it is found that the men of Syracuse have contributed to the next generation one surviving child each, the women only half a child apiece.

Dr. Cattell's investigation of the families of 1,000 contemporary American men of science all of which were probably not complete however, shows that they leave, on the average, less than two surviving children. Only one family in 75 is larger than six, and 22% of them are childless. Obviously, as far as those families are concerned, there will be fewer men of inherent scientific eminence in the next generation than in this.

The decline in the birth-rate is sometimes attributed to the fact that people as a whole are marrying later than they used to; we have already shown that this idea is,

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