INSTITUTIONAL AND PRUDENTIAL SELECTION. 113 
in the hands of those who are capable of receiving, maintaining, and 
transmitting the same.* 
This factor is probably having a profound influence on the present 
‘ evolution of the most highly civilized nations. In his volume on The 
Chances of Death, Karl Pearson says in a note (see p. 83): 
Mr. Francis Galton tells me that he was recently informed by credible medical 
authorities in Paris that the French population is becoming Breton, owing to the 
fact that this element of the population does not limit its fertility to anything like 
the same extent as other elements. Nearly all large families are found to be of 
Breton extraction. 
Similar changes of population are taking place in New England and 
in other countries, and in some of these cases the cause is probably the 
one we are now considering. The continuance cf any human race 
depends not only on its power to produce vigorous and adapted off- 
spring in sufficient numbers, but on its willingness to exercise this 
power and to assume the heavy responsibilities of rearing and train- 
ing the young. If the Bretons are willing, and persist in being willing, 
France may become their inheritance: if they give way, the inheri- 
tance will pass to others. But the French are not the only people 
that are threatened by this selfish individualistic civilization. Its 
blighting effects are apparent among the professional and commercial 
classes in other countries. The statistics obtained by Karl Pearson, 
some relating to families of Anglo-Saxon extraction and others relat- 
ing to Danish families, do not give the proportion of the same classes 
that remain unmarried; but careful analysis of the facts given leads 
him to remark: 
There are clear traces in the statistics of some special action influencing fertility 
in families with between 3 and 7 children. * * * It is noteworthy also that 
this characteristic is less marked in statistics drawn from pedigrees than in more 
recent natal statistics. I can not, therefore, avoid the conclusion that the dip 
between 3 and 7 is not due to compoundness; that its origin is comparatively 
recent, and that it is an artificial break in the natural smoothness of the curve of 
fertility. I believe it to be entirely due to a Malthusian restraint on population. 
Families which reach 7 and over appear to be those in which no check is placed 
on the ‘‘natural’’ growth. Below 7 there is a tendency to restraint which is 
* Since this paragraph was written Mr. Francis Galton has delivered the second 
Huxley lecture of the Anthropological Institute (of London), in which many 
suggestions are made for reversing the present unfavorable action of prudential 
selection. The lecture is entitled ‘‘The Possible Improvement of the Human 
Breed under the Existing Conditions of Law and Sentiment,” and is published 
in ‘‘Nature”’ Oct. 31,1901. In his view the high racial development of the most 
gifted fiftieth part of the human race is of more importance than the suppression 
of the lowest type, though he recognizes both methods as needed for reaching the 
best results. 
