534 EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 



take the family which produced Charles Darwin, the discoverer of the 

 fundamental principle of eugenics, and his first cousin, Francis Galton. 

 Darwin's grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, physician, poet and 

 philosopher, and independent expounder of the doctrine of organic 

 evolution. Darwin's father was a distinguished physician, described 

 by his son as "the wisest man I ever knew." Darwin's maternal 

 grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood, the famous founder of the pottery 

 works. Amongst his first cousins is Mr. Francis Galton. He has five 

 living sons, each a man of great distinction, including Mr. Francis 

 Darwin and Sir George Darwin, both of them original thinkers, 

 honored by the presidency of the British Association. No one will 

 put such a case as this down to pure chance or to the influence of 

 environment alone. This is evidently, like many others, a greatly 

 distinguished stock. The worth of such families to a nation is wholly 

 beyond any one's powers of estimation. What if Erasmus Darwin 

 had never married! 



No student of human heredity can doubt that, however limited 

 our immediate hopes, facts such as those alluded to furnish promise 

 of great things for the future. But let us turn now from genius to 

 what we usually call talent. 



The production of talent. — There can be no question that amongst 

 the promises of race-culture is the possibility of breeding such things 

 as talent and the mental energy upon which talent so largely depends. 

 In the Inquiries into Human Faculty, Mr. Galton shows the remark- 

 able extent to which energy or the capacity for labor underlies intellec- 

 tual achievement. He says, of energy : 



"It is consistent with all the robust virtues, and makes a large 

 practice of them possible. It is the measure of fullness of life ; the more 

 energy the more abundance of it; no energy at all is death; idiots are 

 feeble and listless. In the enquiries I made on the antecedents of men 

 of science no points came out more strongly than that the leaders of 

 scientific thought were generally gifted with remarkable energy, and 

 that they had inherited the gift of it from their parents and grand- 

 parents It may be objected that if the race were too healthy and 



energetic there would be insufficient call for the exercise of the pitying 

 and self-denying virtues, and the character of men would grow harder 

 in consequence. But it does not seem reasonable to preserve sickly 

 breeds for the sole purpose of tending them, as the breed of foxes is 

 preserved solely for sport and its attendant advantages. There is 

 little fear that misery will ever cease from the land, or that the 



