BIOMETRY 431 



of the effective size of families among the intellectual classes now 

 and a comparison with the effective size of families in the like 

 classes in the first half of the last century. You will, I feel certain, 

 find, as in the case of recent like censuses in America, that the 

 intellectual classes are now scarcely reproducing their own 

 numbers, and are very far from keeping pace with the total growth 

 of the nation. Compare in another such census the fertility of the 

 more intelligent working man with that of the uneducated hand 

 labourer. You will, I again feel certain, find that grave changes 

 have taken place in relative fertility during the last forty years. 

 We stand, I venture to think, at the commencement of an epoch 

 which will be marked by a great dearth of ability. If the views I 

 have put before you to-night be even approximately correct, the 

 remedy lies beyond the reach of revised educational systems ; we 

 have failed to realize that the psychical characters, which are, in 

 the modern struggle of nations, the backbone of state, are not 

 manufactured by home, school and college ; they are bred in the 

 bone; and for the last forty years the intellectual classes of 

 the nation, enervated by wealth or love of pleasure, or follow- 

 ing an erroneous standard of life, have ceased to give us in due 

 proportion the men we want to carry on the ever-growing work 

 of our empire, to battle in the fore-rank of the ever intensified 

 struggle of nations. 



710. " Do not let me close with so gloomy a note. I do not 

 merely state our lack. I have striven by a study of the inheri- 

 tance of mental and moral characters in man to see how it arises, 

 and to know the real source of an evil is halfway to find a remedy. 

 That remedy lies first in getting the intellectual section of our 

 nation to realize that intelligence can be aided and can be trained, 

 but no training or education can create it. You must breed it, 

 that is the broad result for statecraft which flows from the equality 

 in inheritance of the psychical and physical characters in man." l 



711. Pearson adopts the ordinary view that the body and 

 mind of the individual are compounded of ' innate ' and ' acquired ' 

 characters, that only the former tend to be * inherited/ and, there- 

 fore, that evolution (or any sort of intrinsic racial change) depends 

 entirely on them, acquirements being mere somatic ' modifications.' 

 On the other hand, the view upheld by me has been that no kinds 

 of characters are more innate or inheritable than any other kind, 

 that the terms ' innate ' and ' acquired ' are misnomers and the 

 causes of endless confusion, misunderstanding, and misinterpretation, 



1 Loc. cit., pp. 206-7. 



