president's address — SECTION D. Ill 



our mischief workers. But it follows that we have the greater 

 necessity for compensatory measures tending to restrain the pro- 

 cieation of any predisposition to disease and vice, and to encourage, 

 on the other hand, the production of a superior manhood. Some 

 measures of restraint at least, some measures of stimulation perhaps, 

 are within the range of practical statesmanship, and the statesman 

 who with a far-seeing eye to his country's good Avill give them 

 shape will earn its gratitude and that of the civilised world. At 

 pi-esent it is curious to witness the stockbreeder's watchful pains 

 to avert from his stud the slightest taint of inferior blood, and the 

 politician's vitter indifference to all precaution of the kind, or it may 

 be his dread of the obloquy which would be his were he to meddle 

 with this one of the greatest of all causes of crimmality and folly 

 in the body politic. But the public opinion he fears will one day 

 say in chorus that it is a crime to perpetuate anything obnoxious 

 to the public weal. It will have realised to itself the mighty 

 though noiseless battle that is raging in every community between 

 its strong desire to rise in the scale of man's development and its 

 equally strong inclination to yield to agencies of debasement. It 

 is the struggle of the diver in the embrace of the cuttlefish whose 

 arms are beset with the suckers of moral and physical degeneracy. 

 Biologists are neither statesmen nor social reformers by profession, 

 but in nil that pertains to heredity they stand in the position of 

 trained advisers to the public and its leaders : and in a matter 

 of such grave import they should not hesitate to declare that 

 ordinary experience of the influence of heredity on domesticated 

 subjects is but an experience of a natural law which controls for good 

 or evil man, equally with all other organisms, and to remonstrate 

 against allowing the human subject to continue exposed to its 

 influences so far as they are malignant. Their remonstrance will 

 probably long fall on inattentive ears. Men and women are inapt 

 to think an application of the principles of successful breeding 

 requisite in their own case ; and will remain so, resentful of any 

 interference with their liberty of choice, until trained to subordinate 

 self-indulgence to the common good. In time, however, we may hope 

 to make some impression on the public mind, if it be only the 

 natural effect of our insistence on that absolute continuity in the 

 life of parent and child which has led to this digression. 



To predicate continuity of life between parent and offspring in 

 the present is to affirm the same of all such relations as far back 

 as human experience reaches. But present life is at one step 

 backward in geologic time found associated with, at the next seen 

 emerging by insensible gradations from, past life — no chasm of 

 death exists between them. All known life then comes under the 

 same predicament, and we are inevitably led back to its first 

 appearance on the earth. Assuming the truth of the conception 

 of cosmical evolution known as the " nebular hypothesis," the one 

 attempt at cosmogony so far successful as to be able to harmonise 



