the percentage, according to population, of nearly 10 per cent. During the same period the colored population had increased 5.9 per cent, but the number of colored illegitimate children had decreased 3.9 per cent, there being actually a less number of colored illegitimate children in 1910 than in 1899, although the population had increased. It seems very probable that this is due to the fact that the great majority of the colored population in Porto Rico is to be found in the towns, where the school system is more efficient than in the country districts and where customs change more easily, due to wider associations and to more frequent and continued intercourse with people of other points of view.

In the country the custom has remained, with little change, due to the fact that the isolation of the country people and the comparatively small number of children in the rural schools has given little opportunity to work against the existing situation. Of the children from the ages of one to ten years there was only an increase of 1,397 white illegitimate children between 1899 and 1910, which was not anywhere near the rate of increase of the white population as a whole. During the same period there was an actual decrease in the number of colored illegitimate children between the ages of one and ten years, amounting to 7,717, or a total decrease of illegitimate children under 10 years of age of 6,320, which would lead us to believe that within the last ten years the births of consensual marriage and the number of illegitimate children have decreased much more rapidly than the total census figures would indicate.

In addition to the question of consensual marriages, we find that under the Spanish administration, when ecclesiastical marriage was the only form recognized, there were no divorces registered in the Island of Porto Rico. With the introduction of the civil marriage after the American occupation, and the institution of divorce laws and the recognition of divorce by the civil authorities, the question of divorce began to demand attention, and in 1910 we find a total of 1,246 divorces among the people in the Island of Porto Rico. About two thirds of these were women,[2] and the divorce question will undoubtedly in time bring as many problems in Porto Rico as it has in the United States.

According to the last report of the Insular Chief of Police, it is estimated that there are in the Island of Porto Rico at the present time about 10,000 homeless children under 12 years of age who live by whatever means they are able, many of them begging or stealing, and most of them having no permanent lodging place, sleeping at night in boxes or on doorsteps, or wherever they happen to find a lodging place secure from the rain. These children are, for the most part, deserted and abandoned children of illegitimate parentage, or orphan children whose parents have left no provision for their care and education, and they constitute a fertile soil for the implanting of criminal tendencies and are ready material for older people of criminal habits. They constitute a danger to the security of the community, and if it were not for the relatively high death rate that is found among people of this class, the Island would soon be overrun by citizens brought up under these criminal-forming conditions. The Insular Government should take measures to reduce this danger by means of the compulsory industrial education of this class of boys and girls. There is enough Government land available to colonize them in different parts of the Island under the care of people trained in reformatory and industrial methods, and this should be done in order that they may become self-supporting individuals who will contribute to the comfort of the community, rather than parasites who live on the charity of others. There are any number of small industries in which they might be trained, as well as along agricultural lines, and the trades which lack skilled workmen in Porto Rico would be much benefited by adding to their number graduates of industrial trade schools, taken from children of this class; these schools should be operated by the Government, at Government expense, but could be made largely self-supporting by means of the sale of the services of the boys, or through the sale of the products turned out.

The living accommodations of the average rural family are very unsatisfactory, consisting, as they do, of a dwelling house of one room, or at the most, two. This reduced house space makes it necessary to eat and live and sleep in the same room, rendering impossible any degree of privacy on the part of any of the family. This condition in the case of growing boys and girls is very undesirable, particularly since it is a custom to take in as members of the family relatives, sometimes of a rather remote degree of relationship, in case they are left unprotected. Another feature of family life which tends toward degeneration and which is found to a great extent in Porto Rico, is the intermarriage between relatives within comparatively close degrees of consanguinity. The civil laws of Porto Rico prohibit the marriage of persons of closer degrees of relationship than first cousins, and the ecclesiastical laws of the Roman Church prohibit marriage within eight degrees of consanguinity. In the record of one family which produced 25 cases of insanity in two generations, it was found that there had been a considerable amount of intermarriage between relatives, one of the grandparents marrying a person who was prohibited by the ecclesiastical law on four different grounds on account of consanguinity. Ecclesiastical permission had been obtained to overcome these difficulties and the marriage took place. There is no doubt that close intermarriage and the failure to introduce new stock into the family tends to both mental and physical degeneration. And where families intermarry for generations, as we find to be the custom in a great many instances in Porto Rico, there can be no doubt of the ultimate disastrous outcome from this custom.

The average Porto Rican family lives very happily and contentedly, the parents displaying great affection for the children and for relatives even of a remote degree of relationship. In the case of the death of parents, relatives usually adopt or take charge of the children which may be left and bring them up as carefully as they would children of their own. The family group is naturally closer among Latin peoples than among Anglo-Saxon races, and this has tended to do away with some of the vices of family life which are found among Anglo-Saxon peoples, while the same circumstances have tended to increase other unsatisfactory conditions of family life peculiar to Latin races.

One of the features which, from the standpoint of society, may have an unfortunate result is the mixture of races in the family life. While this has not taken place to such an extent in the country districts as it has in the towns, nevertheless, a great many families in Porto Rico are composed of mixed races. The biological tendency in cases of mixed races, according to most authorities, is a decrease in the number of children in the family as generation succeeds generation, unless there is an addition of new blood to a considerable extent. This may possibly be one of the means which Nature has provided for solving the problem of overpopulation in Porto Rico, but there is the added fact that usually as the succeeding generations become fewer in regard to numbers, they also become less capable mentally and physically. The race question in Porto Rico will undoubtedly come to be one of the