384 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



dren of the next generation. Were the effects of education inherited, human evo- 

 lution should be rapid, but it has been slow ; how slow perhaps few of us realize. 

 We speak with pride of the advance of human civilization, of our progress in the 

 arts and in useful knowledge, of the improvement in morals and the growth of 

 altruism, and this all makes us blind to the fact that since the dawn of history 

 there has been no clearly recognizable evolution of mankind. We reach larger 

 results in the problem of life than did our progenitors five thousand years ago, 

 but we are able to do so because we build upon their experience and that of all 

 the generations between. 



Have we much greater innate powers? Are we at birth endowed with char- 

 acters having much higher possibilities and much higher tendencies physically, 

 intellectually and morally? Have we to-day men of much greater physical 

 prowess than the ancient conquerors of the world, than the builders who con- 

 structed the monuments of Egypt? Have we more adventurous spirits or more 

 successful explorers than the Phoenicians, who without compass sailed the ancient 

 seas, reaching the whole Atlantic coast of Europe and the British Isles, also 

 passing southward even around the tip of Africa? Are there among us to-day 

 men of keener inventive genius than the one who first used fire, or the inventor 

 of the lever or of the wheel or than the man who first made bronze or smelted ore? 

 Our modern engines have been invented screw by screw by successive builders, 

 each building upon the others' work. Have we to-day men of much larger legal 

 and social understanding than the ancient lawgivers who forged the legal sys- 

 tems which still are the basis of our most enlightened governments? Have we 

 poets whose genius greatly transcends that of Homer, or of the authors of the 

 books of Job and Ruth? In esthetic appreciation, and in the power of artistic 

 expression in sculpture and architecture, we are degenerate compared with the 

 Greeks. 



Even in innate moral character have we greatly advanced? We are learning 

 the lesson of altruism, but are we lorn with a sturdier moral sense? If we could 

 take a hundred thousand infants from London or Chicago and, turning back the 

 wheel of time, place them in the homes of ancient Babylon, would they reach a 

 higher standard of righteousness or of altruism than their neighbors? How 

 little evidence we have of real evolution of mankind since the first emergence of 

 the race from the darkness of prehistoric times! 



But though we accept the statement that innate human character 

 can not be improved by the direct inheritance of the effects of culture, 

 there still remains to us the eugenic method of procedure, which, if it 

 can wisely be applied, may result in improvement in the stirp, in the 

 real essential innate character. This is an ideal that fires the imagina- 

 tion — the breeding of a race that shall be strong and wholesome, phys- 

 ically, intellectually and morally ; men who shall be decent because they 

 are inherently decent, not because by training they restrain their evil 

 tendencies ; a race from whose fundamental character the evil tendencies 

 are actually removed. This is a social ideal higher even than was appar- 

 ently present to the mind of Jesus. 



Is this ideal — of a race of inherently wholesome men — utterly chi- 

 merical, or is there a way of approaching it ? No positive, indubitable 

 answer can now be given to this question, for scientific study of heredity 

 has not yet given us extensive knowledge of the biological, especially of 

 the psychological phenomena of inheritance. 



