60 DARWINISM AND RACE PROGRESS. 



gone by and for many centuries, run the gauntlet of 

 oatmeal porridge and cold east wind. 



But we are rapidly diminishing those selective 

 agencies which in the past have developed race 

 vigour. As we shall presently see, skill in nurturing 

 the sickly has, in modern times, wonderfully re- 

 duced the mortality amongst infants ; improvements 

 in methods of nursing, the replacement of cotton by 

 flannel and wool, and the use of many foods, some of 

 them artificially digested, gives a sickly infant a 

 chance of living, and it survives its first most danger- 

 ous years. Then its chances are again improved, 

 for the infective diseases are being held in check, 

 and it has comparatively little to fear from them. 

 Thus it survives and lives to adult age, when, like 

 the hothouse plant, it is still protected from hard- 

 ships to which the race had formerly been freely 

 exposed. It lives to lower the average physique of 

 the mothers or fathers who produce the next genera- 

 tion of children. 



This increased preservation of the sickly has had 

 the effect of increasing the life period of an average 

 child, and this increase in the life probability is often 

 and very rightly cited as an indication of the im- 

 proved sanitary conditions of the people. Improved 

 sanitary surroundings, as we have seen, are taken 

 advantage of chiefly by the sickly, and thus with 

 our increased probability of life we have diminished 



