44 galton.org
44
Inquiries into Human Faculty
consort with criminals and become the parents of criminals.
An extraordinary example of this is afforded
by the history of the
infamous Jukes family in America, whose pedigree has been made out,
with extraordinary care, during no less than seven generations, and is the
subject of an elaborate memoir printed in the Thirty-first Annual Report
of the Prison Association of New York, 1876. It includes no less than 540
individuals of Jukes blood, of whom a frightful number degraded into
criminality, pauperism, or disease.
It is difficult to summarise the results in a few plain figures, but I will
state those respecting the fifth generation, through the eldest of the five
prolific daughters of the man who is the common ancestor of the race. The
total number of these was 123, of whom thirty-eight came through an
illegitimate granddaughter, and eighty-five through legitimate
grandchildren. Out of the thirty-eight, sixteen have been in jail, six
of
them for heinous offences, one of these having been committed no less
than nine times; eleven others led openly disreputable lives or were
paupers; four were notoriously intemperate; the history of three had not
been traced, and only four are known to have done well. The great
majority of the women consorted with criminals. As to the eighty-five
legitimate descendants, they were less flagrantly bad, for only five of
them had been in jail, and only thirteen others had been paupers. Now the
ancestor of all this mischief, who was born about the year 1730, 15
described as having been a jolly companionable man, a hunter, and a
fisher, averse to steady labour, but working hard and idling by turns, and
who had numerous illegitimate children, whose issue has not been traced.
He was, in fact, a somewhat good specimen of a half-savage, without any
seriously criminal instincts. The girls were apparently attractive, marrying
early and sometimes not badly; but the gipsy-like character of the race
was unsuited to success in a civilised country. So the descendants went to
the bad, and such hereditary moral weaknesses as they may have had, rose
to the surface and worked their mischief without check. Cohabiting with
criminals, and being extremely prolific, the result was the production of a
stock exceeding 500 in number, of a prevalent criminal type. Through
disease and intemperance the breed is now rapidly
