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Leaving the basis of ascertained fact, Mr. Dugdale tried to calculate the cost to society of the entire family of the Jukes, assuming that they number about twelve hundred persons of characters similar to the careers of those he had ascertained. He estimated that in seventy-five years the family cost the community over a million and a quarter of dollars, without reckoning the cash paid for whiskey, or taking into account the entailment of pauperism, crime, and disease of the survivors in succeeding generations.

The second investigation of a group of pauper relatives by Oscar C. McCulloch, of Indianapolis, was suggested by Mr. Dugdale's study of the Jukes, and modelled in some sort after that study, but it has not the scientific accuracy or completeness of its model. The following passage from "The Tribe of Ishmael" (96) characterizes the family sufficiently for our purpose: --

"Members of this extensive group have had a pauper record in Indianapolis since 1840. They have been in the almshouse, the House of Refuge, the Woman's Reformatory, the penitentiaries, and have received continuous aid from the township. The Ishmaels are intermarried with 250 other families of similar habits and tendencies. In the family history are murders, a large number of illegitimacies, and out of the 1092 individuals whose cases have been investigated, 121 are known to have been prostitutes. The members of the family are generally diseased. The children often die young. They live by petty stealing, begging, ash-gathering. In summer they 'gypsy,' or travel in wagons east or west. We hear of them in Illinois about Decatur, and in Ohio about Columbus. In the fall they return. They have been known to live in hollow trees on the river-bottoms, or in empty houses. Strangely enough they are not intemperate. The individuals already traced are over 5000, interwoven by descent and marriage. They underrun society like devil-grass."

Of this pauper family, Mr. McCulloch said he had seen three generations of beggars among them; each child tended to revert to the same life when taken away, and he knew of only one who had escaped and become an honorable man.

If the results of these five studies -- two of conspicuously successful, and three of conspicuously degenerate groups -- should be accepted at their apparent face value, the conclusion would be inevitable that heredity is the determining factor in any career; and yet a critical examination of them will show a number of sources of error. The first of these is the loose and confusing use of the term "heredity." Heredity, as commonly used, means that which the individual has at birth; but this equipment, according to the scientist, is from two sources: ancestral, that is, that which he receives from the uniting germ-cells of his parents, and second, that contributed by his mother during the period of gestation. In the table on p. 99 it appears that from 8 to 14 per cent of all feeble-mindedness is the result of the inadequacy of the mother, and it is not denied that a large part of this is due to poverty and unhappiness of her environment. Although a transmitted quality, it may be due to environment rather than heredity.

In such studies the fact is often ignored that the child inherits, in most cases, an environment that tends to perpetuate his innate qualities. Mr. Booth, in his study of Stepney pauperism, could not separate "pauper heredity and association." The children of the Rooneys, the Jukes, and the Ishmaels, unless removed at birth from family associations, had no chance whatever of escaping a degenerate career. Contrariwise, the royal babies had not only the best physical care, but every opportunity for education, and -- most important of all -- they were disciplined and guarded by superior people.

Again, confessedly, in most of these studies, no account is taken of the members of the family of whom nothing was known. Mr. Dugdale ascertained something of the history of 709 individuals, but in estimating the cost of this family to the state of New York he "assumed" that 500 more, of whom he knew nothing, were equally degenerate. It is an assump-tion equally tenable that the reason they could not be found was because they had escaped from their wretched environment and had been absorbed in the decent but inconspicuous average. In the study of New York almshouse inmates, 10,000 families were represented, and 14,000 persons were known to have been dependent in three generations, but the sum total of persons in these families in the first generation alone could not be less than 50,000 persons. In one generation, therefore, the unknown element is more than twice the number of the known. But perhaps the most fundamental error underlying the deductions commonly made from such studies is that heredity and environment are independent forces, each impelling the individual in a different direction. Of the contradictory notions about the relation of society to the individual, arising from this erroneous conception, Professor Charles H. Cooley says; --