NURTURE AND NATURE 9 



may it not have contributed to emphasizing the very 

 evils it was intended to lessen ? These are the 

 problems which occur to the eugenist and call for 

 investigation and if possible settlement. 



The outlines of our enquiry are not hard to 

 sum up. We know from a variety of investigations 

 that the correlation between physical and mental 

 characters in parent and offspring is about '45 to 

 •50. The first question to be asked is : Are the 

 physical and mental characters of children correlated 

 with their or their parents' environment to a higher, 

 an equal, or a lesser extent ? But even the deter- 

 mination of this first question will not finally solve 

 the relative intensity of the environmental and 

 heredity factors. We have still to ask how far 

 the parents' physical and mental characters are 

 productive of the observed environment. It is 

 conceivable that the relation between children's 

 physique, for example, and parental occupation is 

 an indirect result of the inheritance of physique and 

 a correlation between parents' physique and their 

 occupation. In other words, what we are attributing 

 to environment may be a secondary influence of 

 heredity itself. A weakling may have no option 

 but to follow an unhealthy trade, a man is a tailor 

 or shoemaker, because he has not the physique for 

 smith or navvy. His offspring may be physically 

 inferior because he is a weakling and not because 

 he follows an unhealthy trade. Clearly, to solve our 

 problem, we must know if there be any correlation 

 between the same character in the parent as we are 

 observing in the child and the environment we are 



