446 PHYSICAL DETERIORATION & MICROBIC DISEASE 



In considering any practical problem, therefore, we must first of all 

 determine what we propose to improve whether germinal potentiali- 

 ties, or characters which developed under the stimulus of nutrition, or 

 of use, or of injury and then consider in what way they may best 

 be improved whether by selection or by altering the stimulus, and 

 if the latter, how the stimulus may best be altered. These, then, 

 are the general considerations we must bear in mind. 



731. Physical deterioration in slum-dwellers, factory hands, and 

 sedentary workers generally, may be due to one or more of several 

 conceivable causes. It may be ' innate ' or germinal, in which case 

 it must depend on antecedent selection, or on lack of it, or on 

 injury to the germ-plasm, such as is said to occur in European 

 dogs in India ; or it may be due, not to inferior capacities for 

 development, but merely to inferior growth resulting from lack of 

 sufficient food, or exercise, or from injury (e.g. by disease) to the 

 growing bodies, the soma, of the young. As already indicated, 

 speaking generally, biometricians and medical men believe that the 

 inferiority is, in great 'measure, innate. But they do not trace the 

 alleged ' degeneracy ' to the same source. 



732. Biometricians suppose that in the past a process of social 

 sifting has separated the innately superior from the innately 

 inferior families of the population, 1 the former rising to the 

 upper and middle classes, the latter becoming the dregs that settle 

 in the slums and other habitations of the wretched. But, if this be 

 true of the town, it should not be less true of the country. Pre- 

 sumably the sifting process has occurred everywhere, and in former 

 centuries as well as at the present time. Our towns and factories 

 have only during the last few generations absorbed a considerable 

 proportion of the population. If, then,;the biometric hypothesis be 

 correct, agricultural labourers should be almost as physically 

 inferior to members of the upper and middle classes as slum- 

 dwellers and factory hands. But, to say the least, of this there is 

 no evidence. Doubtless some of the inhabitants of the slums, as 

 of the country, are people who have sunk through the germinal 

 physical inferiority (i.e. incapacity to develop as well as their 



1 May I remind the reader that the words ' innate ' and ' acquired ' may be 

 used in two senses, one of which is correct and the other incorrect. None of the 

 characters of the same individual are more innate or acquired than any other. 

 If any of his characters are innate, then all are innate. If any are acquired, then 

 all are acquired. But different individuals are innately alike if their germ-plasms 

 were alike ; they are innately different, if their germ-plasms were different. 

 They are alike, or unlike, by acquirement if stimuli from the environment have so 

 moulded them that they have grown alike, or unlike. 



