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before it could be regarded as economically advantageous to 
jeopardise the lives of individuals in the fit class, or to increase 
the chance of their transfer to the chronically unfit. In infectious 
disease the actual sickness of one person caused in itself greatly 
increased danger to his neighbour, fit or otherwise. To illustrate 
the effect of the erroneous view that influences for the 
improvement of public health might do more harm than good, 
the lecturer referred to ‘‘sunshine,” and expressed the opinion 
that even the hardiest supporter of that view would hesitate before 
recommending measures for excluding the sun from dwellings in 
order to secure the elimination of the weaker individuals of a 
community. Hence the effect of public health measures could 
never give the chronically unfit the same chance of survival as 
the normally fit, and even if the survival of some of the unfit did 
reduce the rate of improvement of the whole community, it could 
not turn it into a deterioration. Hence the evolution of Society, 
stimulated and supported both by economical and ethical 
doctrine, had led communities to strive for the maintenance and 
improvement of public health, which was, as already stated, 
directed to increasing the fitness of the individuals who composed 
the community, and to the removal of any excessive strain on 
them due to their environment. As regards the extent to which 
the fitness of an individual could be modified, the lecturer 
summarised it by stating that (1) innate qualities of old standing 
in the race were largely permanent during the life of the 
individual, irrespective of environment, and were transmitted more 
or less permanently; (2) certain conditions due to post-natal 
environment of the future parents were probably capable of being 
transmitted by a parent to one, or perhaps two, generations, but 
under an altered environment were subject to modification in a 
more remote posterity; (3) innate and post-natal qualities, 
acquired through influence of environment, to a slight extent 
might be modified. Professor D. J. Cunningham had pointed 
out that there was a certain physical standard which was the 
inheritance of the race, and that however far certain sections of 
the people might deviate from it, through poverty, ignorance, 
squalor, and bad feeding, such deviation was not transmissible 
from generation to generation. “To restore, therefore, the 
classes in which this inferiority exists to the mean standard of 
national physique, all that is required is to improve the condition 
of living, and in one or two generations the lost ground will be 
recovered.” 
The fitness of an individual, as far as it was capable of being 
modified otherwise than by modifications of environment, 
consisted in the capacity to utilise the environment to the best 
advantage—a capacity primarily dependent upon education — 
a word which demanded a wider connotation given to it in the 
future than which was signified by it now, including as it ought to, 

