498 EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 



we shall call John Crosby, its broad acres were divided into three equal 

 shares for his sons. Within three years the appearance of two of the 

 farms had changed. The fences were run down, the stock was run 

 down, the buildings were run down, while the weeds and underbrush 

 had run up. But on the third farm, which fell to the youngest son, 

 the conditions were better than when the father died. This son, 

 Joseph, was rapidly acquiring the lands of his two brothers, William 

 and Alexander. The parts which he acquired promptly became models 

 of successful tillage. I have no doubt that, as the neighbors proph- 

 esied, within a short time William and Alexander will be working as 

 hired laborers for Joseph. 



Now here is a clear case where the environment remained un- 

 changed, while the heredity did change and had a chance to reveal its 

 overwhelming power. All the stimulus was there for each one of the 

 sons. But only one reacted to it. Any biologist would say in the 

 light of his own studies, that Joseph was the only son who inherited 

 his father's vigor and decision of character. However they came by it, 

 no one could talk with the three brothers without discerning that they 

 were radically different men. 



But let us drive on and see a like phenomenon on another farm. 

 We passed down the road and stopped in front of a large, handsome 

 frame house. Two different men had been on this farm within the 

 last twenty years and "couldn't make it pay." It had grown up in 

 thickets and underbrush, the buildings had become dilapidated, the 

 fruit trees were wind broken and worm eaten, until finally a poor immi- 

 grant named Conrad from Switzerland had bought it for a song. 

 Within ten years he had developed it into one of the finest dairy farms 

 in the region. And when I looked at his five-thousand-dollar Holstein 

 bull and his prize cows giving from ten to fifteen thousand pounds of 

 milk a year, I thought on the one hand of what glorious achievements 

 American environment permits men to make, and on the other of what 

 a small percentage of the millions of job-hunting immigrants America 

 has admitted in the past forty years could do as well as Conrad. Had 

 we had the wit to select and admit only the Conrads and the Joseph 

 Crosbys, what a glorious future for our country! What wonderful 

 cows, what splendid hogs, what brilliant poets, painters, inventors, 

 politicians and statesmen would fill this country for all the generations 

 to come! 



It always straightens out this whole tangle of heredity and environ- 

 ment for me to think of two boys I knew in a western state — let us 



