PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 71 



to be shown that such talent and endowment in their ancestors 

 was not the result of education, personal effort, or some other 

 form of acquirement and not of mere accident. 



But the great debate on heridity seems destined to secure 

 still other and more far-reaching advantages. Not only has it 

 assured us that we may hand our good works down to posterity 

 through the law of the transmissibility of acquired qualities, 

 but it may and should teach us that the all-powerful law of se 

 lection is also an instrument in the hands of intelligence for the 

 working out of human destiny. It is the right and the duty 

 of an energetic and virile race of men to seize upon every great 

 principle that can be made subservient to its true advancement, 

 and undeterred by any false ideas of its sanctity or inviola 

 bility, fearlessly to apply it. Natural selection is the chief 

 agent in the transformation of species and the evolution of life. 

 Artificial selection has given to man the most that he possesses 

 of value in the organic products of the earth. May not men 

 and women be selected as w r ell as sheep and horses ? From the 

 great stirp of humanity with all its multiplied ancestral plasms 

 some very poor, some mediocre, some merely indifferent, a 

 goodly number ranging from middling to fair, only a compara 

 tive few very good, with an occasional crystal of the first water 

 from all this, why may we not learn to select on some broad 

 and comprehensive plan with a view to a general building up 

 and rounding out of the race of human beings ? At least we 

 should by a rigid selection stamp out of the future all the 

 wholly unworthy elements. Public sentiment should be created 

 in this direction, and when the day comes that society shall be as 

 profoundly shocked at the crime of perpetuating the least taint 

 of hereditary disease, insanity, or other serious defect as it now 

 is at the comparatively harmless crime of insect, the way to prac 

 tical and successful stirpiculture will have already been found. 



