506 EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 



as in the past, of the red tooth and claw of nature, but the striving 

 passions of men to realize in richer cultures higher values for which to 

 live. 



A rightly directed environment, not by brute death-selection but 

 by the happier method of birth-selection, will improve man's heredity 

 and in turn this better heredity will enrich the social heritage. To in- 

 stil the "will to believe" in a humanity naturally better than ours is 

 as necessary an aim for education as to instil merely, as education 

 does now, the will to believe in better conditions amid which humanity 

 shall live. Education will be doubly effective when it learns this great 

 lesson. 



The ancient Greeks pictured ambition as a beautiful goddess rolling 

 golden apples down the pathway of pursuing youth. Like these 

 fleeting prizes the Eden of eugenics can never be attained. But science 

 and progress has at least stamped the picture of that Eden upon the 

 imagination of mankind : the Eden of a perfect humanity dwelling in 

 an environment of paradise. And, while it is unattainable it is not a 

 mirage. It is merely the great dream of human destiny and possi- 

 bility which men began to dream back in that mysterious time when 

 they started their organic journey from the jungle to their present high 

 estate. Only science and progress have drawn it for us in clearer out- 

 lines, drawn it nearer, and made it the conscious goal of the world's 

 desire. And while it can not be attained any more than Heaven can 

 be here on earth attained, yet the passion for it, the going toward it, 

 the belief in it, the training and education of men for it, constitute that 

 "new religion" of a better humanity which Galton said would "sweep 

 the world." The goddess of humanity's ambitions can never be 

 captured nor embraced; but as Thackeray said of the woman that a 

 man loves, on that last noble page of Henry Esmond, "To think of her 

 is to praise God." 



Note. — The reader must understand that what is handed from one genera- 

 tion to the next is merely these little packets or genes in the germ-cell and not 

 the completed character such as tallness or black color. Neither the tall character 

 nor black color nor any other feature will develop unless proper environment is 

 supplied, and if there should be a radical change in the environment it might be 

 some other color than black would develop. If either the hereditary material in 

 the germ-cell is changed ever so slightly or the environment changed some other 

 character develops than the one which we commonly speak of as "inherited." The 

 reader must not gain the idea that these determiners will develop into some certain 

 characteristics irrespective of the environment. Professor Herbert S. Jennings, of 

 The Johns Hopkins University, has brilliantly and profoundly argued this whole 



