Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/330

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326
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

hyphenated word was joined on the previous page because of the intervening image.— Ineuw talk 05:35, 7 January 2014 (UTC) (Wikisource contributor note)

Croatian.

of all applicants for entry. To put this mental examination of this ratio at least 3,000 of New York's 10,000 feeble-minded children are the progeny of the 9,000,000 immigrants of the last ten years.

Dr. T. W. Salmon writes that New York State is the destination of 26 per cent, of all immigrants coming to the United States, but that more than 80 per cent, of the immigrants found on arrival to be mentally defective or insane are headed for that state. He found more than 8,000 aliens in the New York State hospitals for the insane. The New York State Lunacy Commission reported to the legislature on February 14, 1912, that there were 33,311 committed insane cases in the state institutions. According to Dr. Salmon, more than 25 per cent, of these were aliens, who to a large extent had passed through Ellis Island. The capacity of the institutions was exceeded by 3.043.

Enough has been said to show the intimate relation obtaining between immigration and the prevalence and increase of insanity and mental defectiveness in the United States. It is recognized that these conditions are increasing in an alarming extent and the student of public health and preventive medicine must concern himself seriously with the control and eradication of the sources of this increase. So far as the immigration of the insane and mentally defective is concerned,