250 The Journal 
our part to resist these tendencies to 
urban deterioration, to interpose an- 
other set of standards of what normal 
life should be. 
Statistically speaking cities are centers 
of population, but biologically or eugeni- 
cally speaking, cities are centers of de- 
population. They are like sink-holes or 
siguanas, as the Indians of Guatemala 
call the places where the streams of their 
country drop into subterranean channels 
and disappear. It never happens that 
cities develop large populations that go 
out and occupy the surrounding country. 
The movement of population is always 
toward the city. The currents of hu- 
manity pass into the urban siguanas and 
are gone. Thoroughly urbanized people 
cannot go back and live in the country. 
They have no resources of mind, no 
adequate initiative for meeting agri- 
cultural responsibilities, no interest in 
the world or in themselves that enables 
them to support an existence apart from 
the crowd. They are as helpless and 
ill-at-ease as a honey-bee caged away 
from the hive, or a sheep away from the 
flock. Not all of the people who live in 
cities and towns are urbanized in this 
sense. Many appreciate the country all 
the more keenly because they are shut 
away from it for a part of the time. On 
the other hand, many have a merely 
sentimental interest in farm life or in 
the out-door world without recognizing 
the importance of these factors in human 
development. 
THE EDUCATIONAL ASPECT 
Agriculture is not only the basis of our 
civilization in the mere economic sense 
of affording food to support our physical 
existence, but in a still more fundamen- 
tal, biological sense. It is only in an 
agricultural state that the human indi- 
vidual attains a normal acquaintance 
with his environment and a full endow- 
ment of intellectual and social faculties 
of this race. Wandering savages and 
shepherds may be strong and cunning 
as individuals, but in other ways they 
are lacking, and this is true of people 
raised in cities. Rich and poor alike 
are defective, deprived of normal exist- 
1 Cook, O. F. 
Sciences, Vol. II, p, 125, 1912. 
of Heredity 
ence, lacking in normal development, 
and unable to maintain themselves con- 
tinuously, from one generation to an- 
other. It is for this reason that cities 
have to be recruited continually from 
the country. The biological fact is that 
the human species does not thrive in 
towns. The second generation is gen- 
erally inferior and the third generation 
usually fails. A few by reason of 
strength of character and of family ties 
are able to survive longer, but even the 
Jews, who excel other races in these 
respects and withstand urban conditions 
better, are not a prolific or a numerous 
people. They have continued to exist 
as urbanites, but have not prospered or 
replenished the earth. Perhaps the 
promise to the seed of Abraham awaits 
areturn to an agricultural state. 
From an enlightened eugenic stand- 
point every child should be born and 
raised on a farm, in contact with the 
actual world of kindred, neighbors and 
friends, the domesticated plants and 
animals that represent the basis of our 
existence, and the wild things that live 
without our assistance or even in spite 
of our efforts to destroy them. To 
grow up under these conditions of 
family, farm and out-of-doors is neces- 
sary for normal development, in order 
to allow the normal human character- 
istics to come into expression. 
A RETURN TO BARBARISM 
It is obviously unreasonable to expect 
that children who are deprived of inti- 
mate contacts with nature or with the 
older generation can attain a complete 
development of their natural powers. 
The effect of the urban conditions and 
of the system of elaborately graded 
schools is to take the children out of the 
family group and limit their contacts 
largely to other children of the same age 
—contacts that do not make for any full 
development of the child in the direction 
of general intelligence and responsibility. 
The bonds of the family and other social 
ties are loosened and there is a real 
return to conditions like primitive bar- 
barism, among our urban populations.! 
The transmission of desirable char- 
Definitions of Two Primitive Social States, Journal of Washington Academy of 
