212 MENDELISM chap, xvii 



so. By regulating their marriages, by encouraging 

 the desirable to come together, and by keeping the 

 undesirable apart, we could go far towards ridding 

 the world of the squalor and the misery that come 

 through disease and weakness and vice. But before 

 we can be prepared to act, except, perhaps, in the 

 simplest cases, we must learn far more about them. 

 At present we are woefully ignorant of much, though 

 we do know that full knowledge is largely a matter 

 of time and means. One day we shall have it, and 

 the day may be nearer than most suspect. Whether 

 we make use of it will depend in great measure upon 

 whether we are prepared to recognise facts, and to 

 modify or even destroy some of the conventions 

 which we have become accustomed to regard as the 

 foundations of our social life. Whatever be* the 

 outcome, there can be little doubt that the future of 

 our civilisation, perhaps even the possibility of a 

 future at all, is wrapped up with the recognition we 

 accord to those who live unseen and inarticulate 

 within us — the fateful race of gametes so irrevocably 

 bound to us by that closest of all ties, heredity. 



