RELATION OF EUGENICS TO EUTHENICS 477 



characters." AVhether certain conditions are able to produce a general 

 effect upon the germ cells of such a nature that it may cause a general 

 modification of the resulting organisms for more than the immediately 

 succeeding generations, may perhaps legitimately be considered still 

 open to reasonable doubt. Such a possibility, however, does not come 

 within the scope of our present argument and may be disregarded ; and 

 we may consider it as established to the best of our present biological 

 knowledge that acquired characters are in no specific sense inherited. 



Of course, there are euthenists who will not accept the principle I 

 have laid down — to convince such would require an array of biolog- 

 ical facts and experimental results which can not be presented at this 

 time and which are not within the scope of my talk this evening, al- 

 though one or two specific cases as applied to humans — cases of the 

 failure of euthenic experiments — may be cited by way of illustration. 

 A well-known case is that of the "Zero" family residing in Switzer- 

 land, and established by the marriage of two vicious and degenerate 

 persons several generations back. The descendants of this pair include 

 hundreds of offspring (of which 190 were known to be living in 1905) 

 characterized by " vagabondage, thievery, drunkenness, mental and 

 physical defect and immorality." But what interests us in this con- 

 nection is that in 1861 a euthenic attempt was made to save many of 

 these children. These were placed in good families, where they were 

 free from their vicious environment ; but " the attempt failed utterly, 

 for every 6ne of the 'Zero' children either ran away or was enticed 

 away by his relatives." More recently a similar experiment has, ac- 

 cording to Mudge, 3 been tried in Scotland, where pauper children from 

 Glasgow were boarded out among the respectable and industrious natives 

 of the western coast. Far from producing felicitous results, he has 

 found that these children, for the most part, revert to their inborn 

 tendencies and as a result in these formerly quiet villages a rowdy, irre- 

 sponsible and even criminal element has been introduced, and "a new 

 slum area is being created by the operation of the inherent slum in- 

 stincts of the putatively rescued denizens of Glasgow's slums." That 

 one of the further dangers incident to this method of caring for de- 

 pendent children is coming to be realized may be inferred from a re- 

 cent newspaper report that the Department of Minor Wards of the 

 State Board of Charity of Massachusetts has decreed that none of its 

 foundlings shall be placed in a family in which there is a minor of the 

 opposite sex. " There would be just enough difference in the relation- 

 ship between the two to make a romance the most probable thing in the 

 world," and this is apparently conceded to be undesirable. 



If we accept this conclusion you may ask, Have we not already put 

 the euthenist to rout? Since euthenics depends upon the betterment of 



3 Mendel Journal, No. 2, 1911, p. 112, et seq. 



