1334 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



quality of seed, nor yet of defective culture-conditions, but both 

 together: and so in the complexities of our human life. Their criti- 

 cism is of old date, but their re-investigation is again before us : it 

 must be long and difficult, to many discouraging, yet not impossible. 

 The current renewal of the ancient selection and control over the 

 plants of cultivation, the animals of domestication, is not one of 

 failure, but of increasing evolutionary encouragement; and so for 

 our own species are the advances of medicine and education. On 

 many lines then we have encouragement: our present knowledge 

 justifies further search and thought, and with purpose and endeavour 

 towards applications. Knowing broadly and increasingly our long 

 ancestry — ^from sub-human types to human, and of these to and 

 through many civilisation-phases, with their heritages each in its 

 way of significance and value, and in each stage with acceleration in 

 time — we cannot despair of abating the associated ancestral burdens, 

 and of more and more advancing from man as he has been, and now 

 is, towards man at his best. 



Breeding Towards Ideal Types. — Every one knows how 

 skilled and successful have been the old-world breeders, as from 

 Arab horses in the past to racers to-day. And though the modem 

 Mendelian breeders now get more assuredly and rapidly to the 

 types they work towards, they all alike, as similarly their fancier 

 and farmer clients, have always had clear and well-defined ideas as 

 to the exact "points" and qualities they wanted, and of the general 

 type to be aimed at as well. But this amounts to saying that through 

 long ages past (the best Arab pedigrees are accepted as authentic), 

 these apparently homely and practical matters of rural business, 

 and towards profit and use even oftener than pleasure, have been 

 uniformly planned and conducted in terms of ideals : clearly imagined 

 and precisely formulated organic ideals, both in general and in detail, 

 for each and every important animal and plant dealt with. Is it 

 then conceivable that the ideal of human good-breeding only came 

 in with recent eugenics? Were the really long ancient pedigrees, as 

 from Egypt and Israel of old to China up to this day, the mere 

 matters of family or personal pride our relatively briefer ones in 

 Europe have degenerated into, as did the art of animal and plant 

 breeding so long with them? Is it not a more reasonable hypothesis, 

 that of old human selection went on with much at least — if not even 

 more — of the care and experience and insight from which have come 

 our domesticated animals and cultivated plants, each and all of 

 them prehistoric? When anthropologists are never done discussing 

 selective pairing practices and restrictions, like exogamy and 

 endogamy in ancient peoples, which our modern "myth of savagery" 

 still teaches most of us to scorn, what close and keen attention to 

 breed do these and the like not point back to, when they were 

 being established long ago? This passage from Theognis (about 



