SOCIAL HEREDITY 269 



ally shocked, startled, and in the end deeply impressed 

 for evil the average mind throughout the West. 



As the movement ran its course in literature its 

 effects became many sided. Following in the wake 

 of the Darwinian development, conclusions about the 

 effects of inborn heredity, such as were reached in the 

 study of diseases by medical researchers, in the study 

 of crime by criminologists like Lombroso, in the study 

 of inheritance in plants and animals by Mendelians 

 like Bateson, tended to be carried in literature far 

 beyond their legitimate applications. They were 

 made by imaginative theorists to supply the basis 

 for vague, far-reaching generalizations about human 

 society, and about races and nations, and even about 

 civilization as a whole, the effect of which on the 

 general mind throughout the West was profoundly 

 disintegrating and demoralizing. 



The movement came in time to influence widely 

 social and political affairs even in world- wide aspects. 

 Darwin's cousin, Francis Gal ton, the founder of the 

 branch of study to which he gave the name of 

 Eugenics, maybe said more than any single individual 

 to have helped to give direction to theories about 

 the effect of inborn heredity in peoples and races 

 which it has taken the results of the two greatest 

 wars in the world's history to counteract and per- 

 manently discredit in the Western mind. 



