218 Life and Letters of Francis Gallon 



faith. We know little of how it came about that Aurignacian man replaced 

 Mousterian man ; but the ascent was a steep one, and man needs once more 

 some such rapid elevating. With our present acquaintance with the laws 

 of heredity, with our present knowledge of how customs and creeds 

 have changed, can we not hasten the evolutionary process of fitting man to 

 the needs of his present environment ? It is indeed a great task because it 

 involves control of the most imperious instinct of living beings, so imperious 

 that Nature's method of improvement has been to provide quantity and seek 

 therein for quality. The new creed bids us seek quality and restrict quantity ; 

 separate, where race demands it, the scarce controllable instinct of mating 

 from the parental instinct, and teach nations to pride themselves on the 

 superior type of their citizens, rather than on their material resources. The 

 eugenic dreamer sees in the distant future a rivalry of nations in the task of 

 bringing to greater perfection their human stocks, and this by an intensive 

 study of biological law applied to man, and its incorporation, it may be 

 gradually, but surely, in a revised moral or social code. 



(2) Address to the Demographers. A paper which bridges the gulf 

 between the Inquiry into Human Faculty of 1883 and the Huxley Lecture 

 of 1901 is Galton's" Presidential Address "of August 11, 1891, to the Division 

 of Demography of the Seventh International Congress of Hygiene and 

 Demography*. The word "Eugenics" does not occur in the address, it has 

 no topical title, and yet it is an insistent demand for the study of eugenic 

 problems. The paper has escaped and is likely to escape attention, it is not 

 as far as I am aware included in any list of Galton's published papers, nor are 

 copies of it among his offprints or in the bound volumes of his memoirs. Yet 

 the address is of very great interest, not only for its intrinsic suggestiveness, 

 but because it shows how during twenty years Eugenics had retained a fore- 

 most place in Galton's mind. His appeal, however, produced as little effect 

 on the demographers as it did later on the anthropologists. 



The topics with which the address deals are the relative fertility of various 

 classes within a nation, and the relative fertility of nations among them- 

 selves— intranational and international fertilities — whereby tendencies arise 

 for one class or one race to supplant another. Referring to the hypothesis 

 of Malthus, Galton asks : 



" Is it true that misery, in any justifiable sense of that word, provides the only check which 

 acts automatically, or are other causes in existence, active, though as yet obscure, that assist 

 in restraining the overgrowth of population ? It is certain that the productiveness of different 

 marriages differs greatly in consequence of unexplained conditions.... One of the many evidences 

 of our great ignorance of the laws that govern fertility, is seen in the behaviour of bees, who 

 have somehow discovered that by merely modifying the diet and the size of the nursery of any 

 female grub, they can at will cause it to develop, either into a naturally sterile worker, or into 

 the potential mother of a huge hive." (p. 8.) 



Galton is here foreshadowing the sterilisation of those sections of the com- 

 munity of small civic worth, which has since become a pressing question of 

 practical politics. He suggests that if persons are graded in a nation on 



* Transactions of that Congress, pp. 7-12, London, 1892. 



