36 SOME RECENT MISINTERPRETATIONS OF THE 



If .till "tyn>s in the art of nurture" is it not because we 



have m-vrr hitherto procercK-d to nu-iiMire the effect of various types 

 viionnu-nt. but assumed that what made life easy for man mu>t 

 also In hot for man? If mankind has remained a tyro aft 

 thousand yrars < xjxriinenting, is it not rather idle for Professor 

 Thomson to trll us that somehow or somewhere, he or somebodx 

 is going to makr more out of nurture? What evidence has he that 

 tlu-re are "large fallow areas in the brain still to be cultivat 

 Nature does not long preserve what is not used; she is nothing if not 

 economical! Have those great fallow areas in the brain been lying 

 idle since the date of our apelike ancestors, or only since neolithic 

 times? \Yhat necessity of evolution called them into existence and 

 why have they remained quiescent ever since? Which section of the 

 brain do they lie in? How has Professor Thomson discovered that 

 present day man is superman asleep, and what is the sort of nurture 

 phosphorus or the pedagogue which will rouse these fallow areas into 

 activity? Such wordy dogmatism would be outbalanced by a single 

 grain of the investigating statistical spirit of Francis Galton. Professor 

 Thomson is a member of the Council of the Eugenics Education 

 Society. Let us now turn to the words of its President. 



Major Leonard Darwin writes as follows in the Journal of the 

 Eugenics Education Society. 



" It is impossible to compare heredity as a whole with environment 

 as a whole as far as their effects are concerned; for no living being 

 can exist for a moment without either of them 1 . Moreover, in order 

 to compare two things so as to be able to use the words more or less 

 in connection with such a comparison, we must have a common unit 

 of measurement applicable to them both. But what is the unit by 

 which both heredity and environment may be measured? I myself 

 have no idea. May we not be discussing questions as illogical as 

 enquiring what portion of the area of a rectangle is due to its width 

 and what to its length? Is it ever wise to use words in scientific 

 literature without endeavouring to attach a definite meaning to them 2 ?" 



1 There would in our sense be no heredity if the average child born to noteworthy 

 parents was equal to the average child of the whole community. Yet it is perfectly 

 easy to understand how living beings could exist under such a law of reproduction. 

 Major Darwin seems to be confusing two things, interspecial and intraspecial heredity, 

 the fact that a man is born true to his species, and the fact that he resembles his 

 immediate ancestry. It is the latter fact only which concerns us when we compare 

 heredity and environment, i.e. how far variation of immediate ancestry affects the 

 individual's physical or mental characters. But without such heredity individuals 

 might quite well exist. 



: The Eugenics Review, vol. v, p. 152. The italics are mine. 



