HUMAN LIFE 



done; and then we can bring to bear the 

 power of our social inheritance to make 

 human life rapidly better by encouraging 

 the good and discouraging the bad in 

 biological inheritance. 



But we do not have to wait until we 

 know the order of inheritance for all our 

 traits before we can begin to use wisely 

 this new knowledge of heredity that 

 began with the revelations of the Augus- 

 tinian monk Mendel about the inheri 

 tance of stem length and pod shape and 

 seed coat of garden peas. We can begin 

 on a basis of the knowledge of the heredity 

 behavior of a single trait. Let me give 

 you an example. 



For a long time the characters consid 

 ered in studies of heredity were exclu 

 sively physical ones. Just as in the 

 beginning days of anatomical study man s 

 body was considered too sacred to be 

 submitted to dissection, so in the begin 

 ning days of heredity study man s mental 

 traits were considered too sacred for 

 scientific analysis. It was Galton, as I 

 76 



