FRANCIS G ALTON 185 



in his work on heredity. In the introductory chapter to " Hereditary 

 Genius " of 1869 we read : 



I conclude that each generation has enormous power over the natural gifts 

 of those that follow, and maintain that it is the duty we owe to humanity to 

 investigate the range of that power, and to exercise it in a way that, without 

 being unwise towards ourselves, shall be most advantageous to future inhabitants 

 of the earth. 



The subject had been discussed by him four years earlier in Mac- 

 mUlan's Magazine. In "Inquiries into Human Faculty" of 1883 

 we read : 



My general object has been to take note of the varied hereditary faculties 

 of different men, and of the great differences in different families and races, to 

 learn how far history may show the practicability of supplanting insufficient 

 human stock by better strains, and to consider whether it might not be our duty 

 to do so by such efforts as may be reasonable, thus exerting ourselves to further 

 the ends of evolution more rapidly and with less distress than if events were left 

 to their own course. The subject is, however, so entangled with collateral con- 

 siderations that a straightforward step-by-step inquiry did not seem to be the 

 most suitable course. I thought it safer to proceed like the surveyor of a new 

 country, and endeavor to fix in the first instance as truly as I could the position 

 of several points. 



It must not be thought that Francis Galton's contribution to this 

 branch of social science was merely the demonstration of the inherit- 

 ance of both normal and abnormal bodily and mental traits. In 

 "Human Faculty" of 1883 and in the preceding memoirs upon which 

 it was based are many topics of great sociological importance : gregarious 

 and slavish instincts, population, and racial migrations, early and late 

 marriage, and marks for family merit. 



One of these questions which Galton discussed a quarter of a cen- 

 tury and more ago has attracted and is bound to attract increasingly 

 the attention of sociologists. It is the question of the relative contri- 

 bution of town and country families to future generations. " Urban 

 selection " has often been discussed by anthropologists. If it be true 

 that the physically fitter and psychically superior are drawn into the 

 grind of the city, and if it be true that both physical and mental traits 

 are inherited, then it becomes of paramount importance to learn 

 whether the families in the city do their share towards filling the ranks 

 of the oncoming generation. Under any system in which they do not, 

 every large city is an open wound from which the best blood of the 

 nation is being poured. As long ago as 1873, Galton attempted to 

 measure the relative rate of supply of city and country families to the 

 population of future generations. 



The new science which purposes to gather and sift and coordinate 

 data concerning factors which are of significance in determining the 

 characteristics of races was christened eugenics by Mr. Galton as early 

 as 1883. As defined in the publications of the laboratory which he has 

 endowed " National eugenics is the study of agencies under social con- 



VOL. LXXIX. — 13. 



