198 



The Journal of Heredity 



hereditary traits which slip down 

 through generation after generation. 



It was perfectly natural that one of 

 Mr. Bell's deep insight into things 

 should take a keen interest in matters 

 of heredity and puzzle over them for 

 years. Before anyone else had applied 

 the modern statistical methods to an 

 investigation of the working of its laws 

 he burrowed into one of the most strik- 

 ing cases of human inheritance, — the 

 inheritance of deafness, and later he 

 took up in his characteristic way an 

 investigation into the inheritance of 

 longevity. His first study has put 

 him in the rank of earliest explorers 

 in the field of eugenics, and his later 

 work has marked him as belonging to 

 the positive eugenists who believe 

 that the improvement of the human 

 race will only come from the mating of 

 the desirables, and that to stop the 

 mating of the undesirables will not 

 advance the race unless it is accom- 

 panied by the mating of the desirables. 



He believed that you could not 

 frighten people into doing the right 

 thing by showing them the direful 

 results of mismating but that you could 

 lead them to marry the desirables by 

 pointing out the possibilities which 

 would result from such marriages. He 

 viewed the whole problem of eugenics 

 from the biologist's point of view rather 

 than from that of the morbid anato- 

 mist and criminologist, and deliberately 

 kept in touch with the wider back- 

 ground of genetics through his personal 

 experiments with multinippled sheep. 

 He was sometimes impatient with those 

 who, from looking too long or too 

 closely at the defective side of human 

 life, failed to see that in the evolution 

 of a species there would probably 

 always be a certain percentage of de- 

 fectives but that their presence did 

 not warrant anyone in being pessimis- 

 tic as to the ultimate fate of humanity. 



SENSE OF THE SPECTACULAR 



It always seemed to me that Mr. 

 Bell, although interested in all sorts of 

 speculation, kept always in the fore- 

 ground of his mind the chief object of 

 a scientific life — the accumulation of 



facts. He seemed more interested in 

 getting at the actual facts then in 

 building a theory, although he had the 

 keenest sense of anyone I have ever 

 known of the spectacular aspect of any 

 new discovery. 



This sense of the spectacular has 

 always appeared to me to be an inborn 

 trait responsible perhaps for his almost 

 uncanny flaire with regard to what 

 would interest a large number of 

 people; it was what might be called 

 his "news sense." His interest in 

 photographs is reflected in the policy 

 which Mr. Grosvenor has so success- 

 fully developed in the National Geo- 

 graphic Magazine and appears to me to 

 be simply a part of the undimmed 

 boyish curiosity to see things which 

 made him carry a hand lens in his 

 pocket for years and led him to wire 

 me enthusiastically to go ahead in the 

 preparation of a book of photographs 

 of insects magnified from five to twenty 

 diameters. 



Born as he was with sensibilities 

 much more acute than the usual, he 

 kept them from becoming dulled, so 

 that to him a candle flame, a flying 

 bird, a foggy morning, calm streaks 

 on the waters of the lake, the drop- 

 ping of a cone on the roof, or a child 

 who lisped had an interest which never 

 wore away. If he walked through 

 the bull-rushes on the edge of the 

 pond near his house-boat he could 

 not help gathering the seeds and trying 

 to make a porridge out of them. The 

 sphagnum moss of the bog near by 

 made him wonder if he could not use 

 it to make improvised clothes for him- 

 self, imagining he was a shipwrecked 

 mariner on his beach. 



The water running down the window 

 pane on a cool morning did not escape 

 his attention and after wondering, as he 

 often told us, "all his life long" how 

 fresh water could be condensed from a 

 fog so that mariners at sea should not 

 die of thirst, he at last devised two 

 contrivances for condensing water at 

 low temperatures. One of these em- 

 bodied the principle of blowing air into 

 a cold bottle and the other the dripping 

 of a window pane. 



