x.] DISEASE. 175
They struck me as so remarkable, in the way shortly to be explained, that I proceeded to verify them by as different a set of data as my Records could afford. I took every fraternity in which at least one member was consumptive, and treated them in a way that would answer the following question. "One member of a fraternity, whose number is unknown, is consumptive ; what is the chance that a named but otherwise unknown brother of that man will be consumptive also ? " The fraternity that was taken above as an example, would be now reckoned as one of nine members, of whom one was actually consumptive. There were 84 fraternities available for the present purpose, and the results are given in the line B of the table. The data in A and B somewhat overlap, but for the most part they differ. ,
They concur in telling the same tale, namely, that it is totally impossible to torture the figures so as to make them yield the single-humped " Curve of Frequency " (Fig. 3 p. 38). They make a distinctly double-humped curve, whose outline is. no more like the normal curve than the back of a Bactrian camel is to that of an Arabian camel. Consumptive taints reckoned in this way are certainly.not " normally" distributed. They depend mainly on one or other of two groups of causes, one of which tends to cause complete immunity and the other to cause severe disease, and these two groups do not blend freely together. Consumption tends to be transmitted strongly or not at all, and in this respect it resembles the baleful influence ascribed to cousin
