Evidently we here
approach less sophisticated forms of number-worship, as that which
attached a superstitious meaning to the seventh son of a seventh son.
It seems, therefore, necessary to point out--surprising though the
necessity be--that, if the biometrical conclusion be valid, what it
demonstrates must surely be not the occult working of certain changes in
the germ-plasm, for instance, of a father, because a certain number of
his germ-cells, after separation from his body, have gone to form new
individuals (changes which would not have occurred if those germ-cells
had perished!), but rather a correlation between the _age_ of the
parents and the quality of their offspring. How cleverly the
biometricians have involved one muddle within another will be evident
not only from considering the evident absurdity of supposing--as their
argument, analyzed, necessarily supposes--that a man's body can be
affected by the diverse fates of germ-cells that have left it, but also
when we observe that one of the commonest and most obvious causes of the
reduction in the size of families is the increasing age at marriage of
both sexes. Two persons may thus marry and become parents at the age of
say thirty, their child ranking as first-born, of course, in the
biometricians' tables; but had they married ten years sooner, a child
born when the parents were thirty might rank as the tenth child, and
would be so reckoned by the biometricians.
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