THE HUMAN PLANT 365 



charges. Without such attention to the physical 

 environment it would have been quite impossible 

 to produce the improved races that have been 

 developed at Santa Rosa and Sebastopol. 



And unless a way can be found to make the 

 average environment of successive generations of 

 human beings better and better — instead of al- 

 lowing it to become worse and worse — we cannot 

 hope that the generations of our grandchildren 

 and great-grandchildren will maintain the aver- 

 age standards of our own time, much less 

 improve upon them. 



Educating the Seedling 



A word must be said also as to the influence 

 of environment in its bearing on the mental and 

 moral development of the individual in deter- 

 mining the bringing out or the suppression of 

 hereditary potentialities. 



The mental and moral attributes of man may 

 be likened to the flower or fruit of the cultivated 

 plant, in that they are the qualities most recently 

 developed or transformed through selective 

 breeding. In token of their newness, they are 

 the qualities most easily altered or modified by 

 environing influences or by new racial blendings. 



There are, for example, the qualities that are 

 prone to "Mendelize" in hereditary transmission. 



