NOTES AND ABSTRACTS
La r^ente enqufite de la soci^t^ des agriculture de France sur les causes de 1' abandon des catnpagnes. — The tendency is toward the city. Primary instruc- tion is not given in the rural point of view. The things taught are industrial and commercial instead of agricultural. The young girl trained in the schools has an aversion to rural work ; she dreams of marrying a man of the city, an artisan, a shopman, an employee of some kind. If the school has not turned the young farmer away from the paternal occupation, he at least finds it difficult to secure a companion who shares his tastes and sentiments. Obliga- tory military service also drags the young man away from the farm, and the external brilliancy of the city attracts him ; the offers of employment there decide him against the rural district. A powerful cause of rural depopulation is found in absentee proprietary. There is, however, a reaction in this regard at present, but if proprietors return to the country to continue living urban lives of luxury instead of entering into the life of their tenants, that will be worse than absenteeism. — Rene Lavollee, Reforme sociale, September, 1909.
R. B. McC.
Les oeuvres sociales de protection de la premifere enfance. — Necessity for protecting early infancy rests on observations made for some time that infants of the lowest age die in great numbers, making infantile mortality become an important cause of depopulation, and a social peril along with alcoholism, tuberculosis, and syphilis. Investigations have found the chief cause of these early deaths in the feeding of nurslings ; it is too often from the bottle which contains milk of a poor quality. Statistics secured by H. Monod show 47 out of 100 deaths due to diarrhea among infants fed from the bottle, and 28 out of 100 among infants fed at the breast. Protection must be exer- cised in at least three ways : first, legislative measures for protection and sur- veillance here and there of all infants not brought up by their mothers ; second, maternal nursing in all possible ways, and medical attendance ; third, advice, aid, and relief for needy mothers : this assistance having for its aim to instruct and enable mothers to care for their own infants and to nourish them with their own milk. — C. H. Maygrier, Revue philanthropique, October, 1909.
R. B. McC.
The Integrity of the Family a Vital Issue. — The cry to save the child at the expense of the family is absurd ; the one cannot exist without the other. The test of charity is not in what is given, but in what is obtained from the subject. The problem is to find out what the human mechanism is fashioned to do, for apart from this activity it does not exist. It must be subordinate to a social end. There are two great inevitable social ends, (i) the state (organized society), (2) the family, the primal social unit, the type and origin of the social ends giving man his fullest life. The family with its ritual gives individuality and definiteness of social function as no other institution does or can. — Joseph Lee, The Survey, December 4, 1909. L. L. B.
The Scope and Importance to the State of the Science of National Eugenics. — The essentials of an imperial race are a clean body, a sound if slow mind, a vigorous and healthy stock, and a numerous progeny. In America, however, we find that the classes which take as their standard an academic education, are not reproducing themselves — their average number of offspring being less than two. Against this is the maximum fertility of the degenerate stocks. The state is vitally interested in a scientific knowledge of inheritance, variation, selection, fertility in man, and in the relation of these results to racial efficiency. — Karl Pearson, Eugenics Lab. Led., Series I, Univer. of Lond., 2d ed., 1909.
E. S. B.
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