LUTHER BUKBANK 



be indiscriminate in its application, but will apply 

 to a restricted portion of the community, the 

 favored couples being such as adequately meet 

 conditions imposed by a eugenic board having a 

 fuller knowledge of heredity, perhaps, than any- 

 one at present possesses. 



Materials for such enhanced knowledge are 

 being gathered, however, by the Eugenics Record 

 Office at Cold Spring Harbor, and it is within the 

 possibilities that enough family genealogies, col- 

 lated from a new point of view, will be available 

 in the course of another decade or two to give data 

 for a new type of pedigreed-stock book, of which 

 human beings will be the subjects. 



Such a suggestion probably seems grotesque 

 to the average reader ; even to the reader who has 

 gained a certain inkling of the laws of heredity. 

 Yet a serious consideration of the facts as to the 

 increase of population in recent decades, coupled 

 with reflections on the character of the increase, 

 justifies the prediction that legislative measures 

 based on such knowledge will furnish the basis for 

 marriage customs that will become a matter of 

 everyday routine in the not very distant future. 



We hear much clamor about race suicide; and 

 when a nation like France fails to increase in 

 population as rapidly as its neighbors, the wise- 

 acres shake their heads and talk about national 

 degeneracy. Yet it is known that the population 

 of Christendom has doubled in the past half -cen- 

 tury, and it is a matter of the simplest computa- 

 tion to show that if this rate of increase were to 



[322] 



