INSTITUTIONAL AND PRUDENTIAL SELECTION. 11$ 



in the hands of those who are capable of receiving, maintaining, and 

 transmitting the same.* 



This factor is probably having a profound influence on the present 

 evolution of the most highly civilized nations. In his volume on The 

 Chances of Death, Karl Pearson says in a note (see p. 83) : 



Mr. Francis Gallon tells me that he was recently informed by credible medical 

 authorities in Paris that the French population is becoming Breton, owing to the 

 fact that this element of the population does not limit its fertility to anything like 

 the same extent as other elements. Nearly all large families are found to be of 

 Breton extraction. 



Similar changes of population are taking place in New England and 

 in other countries, and in some of these cases the cause is probably the 

 one we are now considering. The continuance of any human race 

 depends not only on its power to produce vigorous and adapted off- 

 spring in sufficient numbers, but on its willingness to exercise this 

 power and to assume the heavy responsibilities of rearing and train- 

 ing the young. If the Bretons are willing, and persist in being willing, 

 France may become their inheritance : if they give way, the inheri- 

 tance will pass to others. But the French are not the only people 

 that are threatened by this selfish individualistic civilization. Its 

 blighting effects are apparent among the professional and commercial 

 classes in other countries. The statistics obtained by Karl Pearson, 

 some relating to families of Anglo-Saxon extraction and others relat- 

 ing to Danish families, do not give the proportion of the same classes 

 that remain unmarried ; but careful analysis of the facts given leads 

 him to remark : 



There are clear traces in the statistics of some special action influencing fertility 

 in families with between 3 and 7 children. * * * It is noteworthy also that 

 this characteristic is less marked in statistics drawn from pedigrees than in more 

 recent natal statistics. I can not, therefore, avoid the conclusion that the dip 

 between 3 and 7 is not due to compoundness; that its origin is comparatively 

 recent, and that it is an artificial break in the natural smoothness of the curve of 

 fertility. I believe it to be entirely due to a Malthusian restraint on population. 

 Families which reach 7 and over appear to be those in which no check is placed 

 on the "natural" growth. Below 7 there is a tendency to restraint which is 



* Since this paragraph was written Mr. Francis Galton has delivered the second 

 Huxley lecture of the Anthropological Institute (of London), in which many 

 suggestions are made for reversing the present unfavorable action of prudential 

 selection. The lecture is entitled "The Possible Improvement of the Human 

 Breed under the Existing Conditions of Law and Sentiment," and is published 

 in "Nature" Oct. 31, 1901. In his view the high racial development of the most 

 gifted fiftieth part of the human race is of more importance than the suppression 



of the lowest type, though he recognizes both methods as needed for reaching the 



best results. 



