228 INBREEDING AND OUTBREEDING 



advised legislation at the present day. The recommenda- 

 tions of the sympathetic altruist with a little learning have 

 done more than anything else to hinder a healthy growth 

 of eugenic ideas. All we would ask is that the physician, 

 the clergyman, the social worker, the penologist, the 

 statesman, give conscientious consideration to the facts 

 of heredity as a guiding principle in the solution of the 

 problems of the family with which they have to do. No 

 questions are so hedged about with superstition, with 

 irrational tradition, with religious dogma, as those which 

 concern sex and reproduction; no problems are more 

 delicate, more difficult, than those which seek the direction 

 of human evolution ; yet after all man is an animal and 

 must be dealt with as such. Civic law he may escape, to 

 natural law there is no immunity. 



We have seen how characters are transmitted in 

 sexual reproduction in the lower animals and in plants, 

 how hereditary differences carried as potentialities in the 

 germ cells ^re shuffled and divided when these are formed, 

 by a law as definite and precise as one of chemistry or 

 physics. "We have seen how the operation of this law 

 brings about the outstanding phenomena of inbreeding 

 and outbreeding. Man is just another sexually reproduc- 

 ing mammal and a priori his heredity is guided by this 

 law. Being a thoroughgoing egotist, he doesn^t like to 

 realize this. It takes time for the truth to filter in. Com- 

 parative anatomy and physiology and the doctrine of evo- 

 lution have been the greatest agents in this familiariza- 

 tion process. The veriest schoolboy now recognizes the 

 homologies between the bones and muscles of the lower 

 mammals and those of man, and sees nothing out of the 

 ordinary that their digestive metabolisms are the same. 



