i 9 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



be so far in advance of his time that he is largely unappreciated by his 

 contemporaries. This has been to some extent the case with Darwin 

 and with Galton. Happily both lived to receive some parts of the 

 tributes they deserved from their fellows. 



How great is the debt of humanity to the Line of Darwin ! 



On the basis of an immense collection of the facts of natural his- 

 tory, Charles Darwin gave the world a theory which soon swept be- 

 yond the boundary lines of biology and by its clarification and unifica- 

 tion of knowledge has been one of the powerful factors in modern life. 

 Francis Galton was a leader in giving science methods which bring 

 within the grip of mathematical analysis a wide range of biological, 

 social and other natural phenomena hitherto regarded as outside the 

 pale of exact science. Fifty years has made cultured men of all disci- 

 plines evolutionists, and Darwin's name is carved higher than that of 

 any other who worked towards this goal, but after these fifty years we 

 are still in deep ignorance concerning the processes by which evolu- 

 tion has taken place. This problem which has been the cloud by day 

 and the pillar of fire by night in the onward march of biological re- 

 search, awaits solution by the methods of Galton. Charles Darwin and 

 the great men who came to his support sought to show that historically, 

 in origin, man is not a separately favored being set in a garden of all 

 living things to have dominion over them, but that his origin is a nat- 

 ural consequence of the struggle for existence, that step by step he has 

 fought his way to the top of the evolutionary ladder, matching sinew 

 with sinew and cunning with cunning. 



Francis Galton and his school have proved that as applied to man 

 this evolutionary process is not of class-room interest merely, but that 

 its factors are of vital social importance to-day. A complex civilization 

 may be likened to a cathedral of arches, every stone of which is under 

 stress. The permanency of the civilization is limited by the physical 

 and mental soundness of the component human stocks, just as the 

 stability of the cathedral is limited by the texture of the stones which 

 went into its building. Galton and his school have proved that in the 

 determination of the character of the individual, nature is of greater 

 significance than nurture — that the strength of the stone depends 

 primarily upon the quarry from which it came, not upon the height 

 to which it is polished nor upon the elegance of the colonade into 

 which it is built. They have shown that in our strenuous modern life 

 the statistician can point to some factors which tend to conserve and 

 to others which tend to destroy the types of men which have made high 

 civilization possible, and they have told us in ringing words that it is 

 the duty of the man of science to apply the most rigorously exact 

 methods to the investigation of all those factors which tend to improve 

 or impair the racial qualities of generations yet unborn. 



