38 HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN 



later regret as a major error in their lives, it is highly desirable that all 

 intelligent individuals, particularly women, should understand these and 

 other simple biological facts as early as the period of adolescence." 



By unimpeachable statistics it has been found that two-children families 

 are quite inadequate, three-children families fall short, and that an average 

 of four-children families is essential to secure the perpetuation of a desirable 

 family strain. Contraceptionists, who are apparently devoting their chief 

 propaganda to the restriction of births, are more or less unsympathetic to 

 proposals on behalf of "positive eugenics" which would tend to increase 

 breeding in the desirable racial element. As to this crucial point we do not 

 discover that the birth-control advocates have ever proclaimed four- 

 children families among the desirable population as an article of their creed. 

 It is to be noted at once that contraception does not promise to increase 

 the proportionate breeding in the racially desirable element of humanity, 

 namely, to the four-children family standard. 



On the contrary, certain proponents of birth-control are now compelled 

 to admit that contraception has gone to diminish such breeding. In other 

 words, birth control, as distinguished from birth selection, the dynamic plank 

 in Galton's eugenic platform, must thus far be classed among the neutral if not 

 among the adverse influences of racial betterment. As observed by Campbell, 

 "The investigations of Dr. Himes into the results of contraceptive instruc- 

 tion in England wholly confirms this inference. The dysgenic element can 

 be led to water but it cannot be counted upon to drink. Hence as between 

 eugenic and dysgenic results, the present unfavorable balance against 

 contraception has small prospect of being changed into a favorable balance 

 by the universal access to contraceptive information. In other words, 

 contraception promises, in the future as in the past, to prevent more eugenic 

 births than dysgenic births." 



ETHICAL ASPECTS OF SCIENTIFIC MODERNISM 



As regards the ethical aspects of these problems, the contrast between the 

 moral standards of Thomas Henry Huxley as seen in his "Aphorisms and 

 Reflections" 2 up to the year 1895, and the satirical forecast in the year 1932 

 of the future "Brave New World" by his distinguished grandson, Aldous 

 Huxley, gives us a vivid realization of the moral revolution of the past forty 

 years. Such extreme modernism is more than a revolution. It is com- 



2 "Aphorisms and Reflections" from the works of T. H. Huxley, selected by Henrietta 

 A. Huxley, London, 1908. 



The principles expressed in this address were adopted by a standing vote of the 

 Congress. Cf. Science, August 26, 1932, Vol, 76, No. 1965, pp. 173-179. 



