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Show SHOULD FIRST COUSINS MARRY? "If a family strain is known to be healthy and free from' insanity and other mental and nervous defects, there is no evidence that it is dangerous dan-gerous to permit the intermarriage of first cousins," was the somewhat surprising statement of Dr. Charles W. Rees, Professor of Zoology at the Utah Agricultural College, in a recent re-cent interview with the college class in journalism. "Of course," he continued, "if there is known to be a weakness in the family strain, such a marriage would be dangerous, because the children chil-dren would be in danger of inheriting inherit-ing the defect in double measure, even though the parents might seem perfectly normal." Professor Rees urges that the fundamental fund-amental findings of the science of eugenics, even though the subject is still in its infancy, should be taught to all parents and future parents. He believes that carelessness in human hu-man matings causes a great deal of needless suffering, and that if humanity hu-manity were fully awake to the situation, sit-uation, substantial racial improvement improve-ment might result. While eugenics is properly a college subject, he believes be-lieves that many of its most important import-ant findings can easily be made the common property of all intelligent readers. Three books are recommended recom-mended as being especially valuable for the lay reader: "Eugenics," bv Popenoe and Johnson, "The Next Generation," by Jev. ett, and "The Kallikaks," by Goddard.' The educational importance of the science was also emphasized. "To my mind," he declared, "Eugenics is of equal importance with psychology as an aid to the teacher ' in under- standing the school child." |