IMPROVEMENT OF THE HUMAN BREED. 219 



tempered^ others surly and vicious; some are courageous, others timid; 

 some are eager, others sluggish; some have large powers of endurance, 

 others are quickly fatigued; some are muscular and powerful, others 

 are weak; some are intelligent, others stupid; some have tenacious 

 memories of places and persons, others frequently stray and are slow at 

 recognizing. The number and variety of aptitudes, especially in dogs, 

 is truly remarkable ; among the most notable being the tendency to herd 

 sheep, to point and to retrieve. So it is with the various natural quali- 

 ties that go towards the making of civic worth in man. Whether it be 

 in character, disposition, energy, intellect or physical power, we each 

 receive at our birth a definite endowment, allegorized by the parable 

 related in St. Matthew, some receiving many talents, others few; but 

 each person being responsible for the profitable use of that which has 

 been entrusted to him. 



Distribution of Qualities in a Nation. 



Experience shows that while talents are distributed in endless differ- 

 ent degrees, the frequency of those different degrees follows certain 

 statistical laws, of which the best known is the Normal Law of Fre- 

 quency. This is the result whenever variations are due to the combined 

 action of many small and different causes, whatever may be the causes 

 and whatever the object in which the variations occur, just as twice 2 

 always makes 4, whatever the objects may be. It therefore holds time 

 with approximate precision for variables of totally different sorts, as, 

 for instance, stature of man, errors made by astronomers in judging 

 minute intervals of time, bullet marks around the bull's-eye in target 

 practice, and differences of marks gained by candidates at competitive 

 examinations. There is no mystery about the fundamental principles 

 of this abstract law; it rests on such simple fundamental conceptions 

 as, that if we toss two pence in the air they will, in the long run, come 

 down one head and one tail twice as often as both heads or both tails. 

 I will assume then, that the talents, so to speak, that go to the forma- 

 tion of civic worth are distributed with rough approximation accord- 

 ing to this familiar law. In doing so, I in no way disregard the admi- 

 rable work of Professor Karl Pearson on the distribution of qualities, for 

 which he was adjudged the Darwin Medal of the Eoyal Society a few 

 years ago. He has amply proved that we must not blindly trust the 

 Normal Law of Frequency; in fact, that when variations are minutely 

 studied they rarely fall into that perfect symmetry about the mean value 

 which is one of its consequences. Nevertheless, my conscience is clear 

 in using this law in the way I am about to. I say that if certain quali- 

 ties vary normally, such and such will be the results ; that these qualities 

 are of a class that are found, whenever they have been tested, to vary 



