BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1323 



qualities of future generations, mentally, morally, and physically. 

 These are biological and psychological, chemical and physical ; economic, 

 social, and political; educational, moral, and religious.' Control of these 

 great agencies, if wrongly directed, will impair man, and if rightly 

 directed, will improve him. You cannot enact Eugenics — it means a 

 new religion, new objects of religious endeavour, a new moral code, a 

 new kind of education, a new conception of many of life's meanings, 

 and of the objectives of social and national life, a new social and political 

 Bible, a change in the very purpose of civilisation, and the fundamental 

 mores (life-ways) of man . It means the improvement of man as an organic 

 being, and that the enhancement of man as a moral being. It means 

 that the enhancement of man's inborn capacities for happiness, health, 

 sanity, and achievement shall become the living purpose of the state. 

 . . . It is a change in the perspective of civilisation, character, and life. 

 It is a new kind of humanism. . . ." 



We must leave now this vigorous platform statement, and even 

 before its climax of appeal, for aid from publicists and men of 

 letters, to turn to the presentment of the case by one of its most 

 weighty exponents, Major Leonard Darwin {The Need for Eugenic 

 Reform, London (Murray), 1926), who speaks not only with the 

 conviction and purpose of continuing his father's work and impulse 

 as he would have wished; but also with the experience of many 

 years' presidency of the Eugenic Education Society, in successor- 

 ship to Galton himself. "Eugenics consists in the utilisation of 

 knowledge acquired in the study of living things, in order to 

 promote the progress of the race." So following this, come careful 

 chapters outlining this knowledge, and impartially discussing the 

 conclusions and the lines of action to which it appears to point — all 

 of which well reward reflective reading. 



For more concrete details, however, a manual of the subject is 

 needed, with summaries and illustrations (conveniently Popenoe 

 and Johnson's Applied Eugenics). The preponderant importance of 

 "Nature over Nurture" — i.e., the importance of good hereditary 

 stock over that of good environmental conditions, is justified at the 

 outset, with explanation of the contribution and influence of 

 Weismann's germ-plasm theory; while the enduring significance of 

 heredity is illustrated from genealogies bad and good, from ordinary 

 cases to the extreme ones. Witness that of one Juke, born in 1720 

 in the fine locality of the New York "Finger Lakes". His two sons 

 married in their time five degenerate sisters, from whom have been 

 traced, through six generations, up to 1877, ^o less than "about 

 1,200 persons, of every grade of idleness, viciousness, lewdness, 

 pauperism, disease, idiocy, insanity, and criminality". More striking 

 still, a fresh monograph of the same family, made in 1915, less than 

 two generations later, enumerates no less than 2,820, of whom half 

 were then living; and who "on the whole still show the same quali- 



