212 THE MENDEL JOURNAL 



than upon the clean and tliose of temperate habits. The latter, 

 in fact, are relatively seldom attacked. Whether by these 

 means we pay too high a price for evolution is not a question 

 with which I am now concerned. Perhaps the annals of the 

 future may supply the answer, when our defective citizens — 

 defective in clean instincts, in discreetness, in thrift, in ordinary 

 judgement — have so accumulated that our army of sanitary 

 officials shall have become so augmented that it cannot be further 

 enlarged on account of its prohibitive cost, and it will therefore 

 be unable to suppress or control the manifestation of the 

 defective qualities of the accumulated horde of defective citizens. 

 Then these imperfectnesses of character may manifest themselves 

 in a way which will surprise us. I am only desirous to point 

 out the dangerous nature of the road along which our modern 

 sentiment is urging us, and to emphasize the consideration that 

 all its hopes are futile, because it hag overlooked the fact that in 

 saving certain citizens from the consequences of their own 

 spontaneous deeds, this sentiment is evolving a sadly defective 

 race. 



Postcript to page 168. " It is one of the most fatal mis- 

 takes to imagine that because to fight and be lacerated tooidd be 

 to some people a painful and fearful thing, that therefore it is so 

 throughout the whole animal kingdom. It is not, I believe, even 

 true for Man," &c. Pages 168-9. " There can be little doubt that 

 prize-fighters and others," &c. 



Since these pages were in the Press, there has been pubhshed 

 in the " New York Medical Record,' an account of an extremely 

 interesting psychological study of the gang of hooligans who have 

 recently terrorised New York. These researches were made in 

 the Department of Psychology of Columbia University by Dr. 

 Siegfried Block, A.M., M.D. The research raises many problems 

 of serious import to civilisation, and it entirely confirms the 

 general contentions which were put forward in my original 

 article and in my reply to Miss Wodehouse's criticism. But 

 with the general results we shall hope to deal in our next number. 

 Only one point it seems necessary to direct attention to now, 

 because it is an experimental verification of the contention, that 

 all animals, and certainly all men, are not equally susceptible to 

 pain, and that any argument based upon the assumption that 

 they are, such as that urged by Miss Wodehouse, is 

 invalid. Dr. Block tells us that these hooligans " are remarkably 

 insensitive to pain." This being so, Miss Wodehouse's lamenta- 

 tion over " mortal combats between jealous wooers and the exter- 

 mination of cattle by the bite of an insect " loses the pathos it 

 was no doubt intended to excite, and the point of the argument 

 is so truncated that it is no longer capable of cogent application. 



