EUGENICS AND EUTHENICS 387 



occur. It was only after Raymond Pearl's masterful experimental 

 analysis of fecundity in fowls into its three physiological unit char- 

 acters, and his combining of the three units into one individual, that it 

 was possible to secure a strain in which high fecundity was a fixed 

 character. In breeding humankind the manipulation of unanalyzed 

 qualities might prove as futile as the earlier experiments at the Uni- 

 versity of Maine. On the other hand Burbank, in his breeding experi- 

 ments, has reached some permanent results, though he has never scien- 

 tifically analyzed into their units the desirable qualities he has suc- 

 ceeded in combining and fixing. But in each case he has dealt experi- 

 mentally with many thousands of individuals and has reached success 

 in but a small proportion of his attempts. His methods offer little 

 chance of success in human breeding. 



Even one wholly unfamiliar with the subject can see at once that the 

 mere outlining of the biological problems of eugenics and evolution is 

 wholly impossible in a limited paper such as this. Yet this very fact 

 points the chief moral I wish to urge. 



We are at the very beginning of our knowledge of heredity. Few of 

 the myriad of unit qualities in mankind, or other animals, have been 

 identified and defined. We know some, perhaps all, the units of hair 

 color and eye color, we know some of the units of shape of hair, and a 

 few other such comparatively simple qualities. But, as yet, we are 

 merely entering the pass that opens on to the broad fields of knowledge 

 of inheritance. We have analyzed a mere handful of the simpler phys- 

 ical unit qualities. We know nothing, as yet, of psychic unit qualities. 

 We can not even be positive that the inheritance of psychic qualities 

 is by definite units which follow the so-called Mendelian laws of inher- 

 itance. That intellectual qualities, and moral stamina, are heritable 

 seems indicated, but the parallelism between their mode of inheritance 

 and that of such a thing as hair color, however probable, is as yet not 

 definitely demonstrated. It is possible that most psychic qualities are 

 too complex ever to be sucessfully and completely resolved into their 

 heritable units. 



How much progress, then, may we hope for. We don't know, and we 

 can not know, until we have had decades, perhaps centuries, of further 

 study of these most intricate problems. By the biologist, trained 

 through the study of evolution to think in geologic epochs rather than 

 years, the dawn of a new day for mankind is foreseen. But to the 

 sociologist, whose chief business is to apply our knowledge to present 

 conditions, the whole subject is of much more limited interest. Aside 

 from a few very limited aspects of negative practise of eugenics, the 

 whole subject is, as yet, of little social significance. The prolonged 

 labor of hundreds of special students is needed before this matter, 

 which already is of the keenest biological interest, can become of the 



