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problems of human reproduction. By Paul Popenoe. Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company, 1926. Pp. 218.
The first mentioned of these two books by the same author is the complement of his “Modern Marriage” which was published in 1925 and served to indicate the ways of conducting more successful marriage relations. The volume now under consideration serves to balance the subject, since it is created to consider the obligations of society to the individual. The book is also intended as an elementary introductory text on the subject of family life from a biological point of view and presents as much of fundamental biological data as its small size will allow. The material presented is divided into four parts.
Part one examines into the conditions which exist in the effectively adapted family situation and its relations to the progress of evolution. The author describes the normal family with its possible and usual types of mating, including promiscuity, free love, polygamy and monogamy, factors entering into the choice of a mate, the attitude and restrictions of society toward these matters, reproduction from the standpoint of quantity and quality of offspring, and the influence of the family life on men, women, and children.
Part two discusses the obstacles that interfere with the normal biological functioning of the family with celibacy, premarital incontinence, delayed marriage, broken homes, prostitution, venereal diseases, infertility, illegitimacy, abortion, and inadequate and excessive reproduction in certain types of families as the principal topics. Part three outlines the means of social control (1) through education in its relations to parents, school years, the preadolescent period to physicians, and to special training; (2) through public opinion concerning the social activities of children and young people, matrimony, childbearing, and several maldevelopments that have originated through instinctive trends; (3) through various economic reforms applying to