8 THE TREND OF THE RACE 



insufficient for the solution of particular problems the defects may 

 often be remedied by collecting additional information. Many 

 questions of paramount importance are capable of solution by the 

 use of the biometrical methods employed by Pearson and his 

 co-workers of the Galton laboratory. What we need above all is 

 investigation. And it is important that we realize that investiga- 

 tion of the trend of human development is peculiarly timely. Our 

 custom of regarding evolution as an exceedingly slow process in 

 which a few centuries more or less count for relatively little 

 should not make us unmindful of the fact that important racial 

 modifications may at times take place in a very few generations. 

 For an illustration of this fact it is only necessary to allude to the 

 remarkable results which have been achieved, even within a few 

 years, by the selective breeding of plants and animals. Many lines 

 of evidence point to the conclusion that our human inheritance is 

 changing at a comparatively rapid rate. In a species containing 

 the great diversity of hereditary qualities which is exhibited by 

 mankind there are abundant possibilities of rapid transformation. 

 A person with our present knowledge of human heredity and en- 

 dowed with the authority which the Great Master in Campanula's 

 City of the Sun exercised over the matings of men and women, 

 could produce, in a few generations, a remarkable array of diverse 

 types. He could, for instance, breed an albino race, a deaf race, 

 a feeble-minded race, an insane race, a race of dwarfs, a race with 

 hook-like extremities instead of hands, a race of superior intellec- 

 tual ability, or a race of high artistic talent. It may be said that 

 such changes as may occur in a few generations affect merely the 

 prevalence of characteristics already present, or the making of 

 different combinations of existing hereditary factors. But from 

 the standpoint of human welfare the importance even of such 

 changes is tremendous. They may make all the difference 

 between a breed of wretched degenerates and a race of physical 

 vigor and superior mentality. The human species possessing so 

 great a diversity of hereditary traits and subjected to the in- 

 fluences of so many changing forces both physical and social can 

 scarcely fail to undergo more or less rapid modification. If our 



