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191
Report of the County Medical Officer—Education.
The correlation co-efficient between the size of the fraternity and the order of birth is for the
defectives, r = .81 ± .06, and for the normals, r = .65 ± .008.

Defective
children.

Scholarship
children.
These tables are at their extremes open to the possible fallacies: (1) that the smaller families may
not be complete, actually over 80 per cent, of those with only one or two members were complete,
owing to the death or age of the parents; (2) that in the smaller families there would be a greater chance
of the older members having attained the age at which the examination, whether for scholarships or
mental deficiency, coilld be conducted, and that other members may subsequently qualify; this,
however, appears contradicted in the defective children, but may be asserted for the groups of efficient
families in which there are only two or three members; (3) that in the larger families the younger members
would be more likely to be of the required ages, and that earlier members may also have been specially
efficient or deficient; this criticism cannot be negatived from the data available for families with more
than ten members.
Relative fertility of efficient and deficient stocks.—Great importance attaches to the relative fertility
of efficient and deficient stocks. It is often asserted that the fertility rate of the deficient is so great
that in a short time they will outnumber the sound stocks. Others think that a selective death rate
operating more strongly against the defective stock will quite counterbalance this fertility. Some data
bearing on the question can be obtained from the medical records of the special and secondary schools.
The numbers of children born and the number who had died at the date of the record have been taken