October 22, 1908] 



NATURE 



647 



possessors of notable eugenic qualities — let us for brevity 

 call them " Eugenes " — will form their own clubs 

 and look after their own interests. It is impossible to 

 foresee what the state of public opinion will then be. 

 Many elements of strength are needed, many dangers have 

 to be evaded or overcome, before associations of Eugenes 

 could be formed that would be stable in themselves, useful 

 as institutions, and approved of by the outside world. 



The suggestion I mtide in the earlier part of this paper 

 that the executive committee of local associations should 

 cooperate, wherever practicable, with local administrative 

 authorities, proceeded on the assumption that the inhabi- 

 tants of the districts selected as the eugenic " field " had 

 a public spirit of their own and a sense of common 

 interest. This sense would be greatly strengthened by the 

 enlargement of mutual acquaintanceship and the spread 

 of the eugenic idea consequent on the tactful action of 

 the committee. It ought not to be difficult to arouse in 

 the inhabitants a just pride in their own civic worthiness, 

 analogous to the pride which a soldier feels in the good 

 reputation of his regiment or a lad in that of his school. 

 By this means a strong local eugenic opinion might easily 

 be formed. I^ would be silently assisted by local object- 

 lessons, in which the benefits derived through following 

 eugenic rules and the bad effects of disregarding them 

 were plainly to be discerned. 



The power of social opinion is apt to be underrated 

 rather than overrated. Like the atmosphere which we 

 breathe and in which we move, social opinion operates 

 powerfully without our being Conscious of its weight. 

 Everyone knows that governments, manners, and beliefs 

 which were thought to be right, decorous, and true at one 

 period have been judged wrong, indecorous, and false at 

 another ; and that views which we have heard expressed 

 by those in authority over us in our childhood and early 

 manhood tend to become axiomatic and unchangeable in 

 mature life. 



In circumscribed communities especially, social approval 

 and disapproval exert a potent force. Its presence is only 

 too easily read by those who are the object of either, in 

 the countenances, bearing, and manner of persons whom 

 they daily meet and converse with. Is it, then, I ask, 

 too much to expect that when a public opinion in favour 

 of eugenics has once taken sure hold of such communities 

 an(f has been accepted by them as a quasi-religion, the 

 result will be manifested in sundry and very effective modes 

 of action which are as yet untried, and many of them even 

 unforeseen ? 



.Speaking for myself only, 1 look forward to local 

 eugenic action in numerous directions, of which I will 

 now specify one. It is the accumulation of considerable 

 funds to start young couples of " worthy " qualities in 

 their married life, and to assist them and their families 

 at critical times. The gifts to those who are the reverse 

 of " worthy " are enormous in amount ; it is stated 

 that the charitable donations or bequests in the 

 year 1907 amounted to 4,808,050/. I am not prepared to 

 say how much of this was judiciously spent, or in what 

 ways, but merely quote the figures to justify the inference 

 that many of the thousands of persons who are willing 

 to give freely at the prompting of a sentiment based upon 

 compassion might be persuaded to give largely also in 

 response to the more virile desire of promoting the natural 

 gifts and the national efficiency of future generations. 



ZOOLOGY AT THE BRITISH 

 ASSOCIATION. 



The Rule of Priority in Zoological Nomenclature. 

 lyrR. G. A. BOULENGER expressed disapproval of the 

 extreme application of the rule of priority in zoo- 

 logical nomenclature on the ground that it had already 

 produced much mischief under the pretence of arriving at 

 ultimate uniformity. The worst feature of the abuse of 

 this rule is not so much the bestowal of unknown names 

 on well-known animals as the transfer of names from one 

 to another, as in the case of Astacus, Torpedo, Holothuria, 

 Simla, Cynocephalus, &c., so that the names which were 

 uniformly used by Cuvier, Johannes Muller, Owen, 



NO. 2034, VOL. 78] 



Agassiz, Darwin, Huxley, and Gegenbaur would no longer 

 convey any meaning ; very often they would be misunder- 

 stood, and the very object for which Latin or Latinised 

 names were introduced would be defeated. While con- 

 sidering uniformity in the future, it was surely important 

 to have some consideration for the past ; the speaker 

 suggested that names with which all general zoologists 

 are familiar should be protected from the revisers of 

 nomenclature, and that it might be possible for committees 

 to be appointed to determine, group by group, which names 

 are thus to be respected, not necessarily on the ground of 

 their earliest date or their correct application in the past, 

 but as having been universally used over a long period 

 in a definite sense. Mr. Boulenger's proposals were sup- 

 ported by several subsequent speakers, and the section 

 agreed that a resolution, in the sense of and containing 

 the manifesto published in Nature, vol. Ixxviii., p. 395, 

 be communicated to the principal British zoological socie- 

 ties, to Section C, and to the British representative on the 

 committee of nomenclature of the International Congress 

 of Zoology. 



The Determination of Sex. 



A discussion, jointly with Section K, on the determina- 

 tion of sex, was opened by Mr. L. Doncaster. After 

 briefly reviewing some of the recent work on the nucleus- 

 in this connection, he proceeded to describe a series of 

 breeding experiments with the moth Abraxas grossulariata 

 and the rare variety lacticolor, and concluded that the 

 explanation of the results which he had obtained must be 

 as follows : — (i) the se.x determinants behave as Mendelian 

 characters, maleness and femaleness being allelomorphic 

 with one another, and femaleness dominant ; (2) all females 

 are heterozygotes, carrying recessive maleness, and pro- 

 ducing male-bearing and female-bearing eggs in equal 

 numbers ; all males are homozygous, carrying only male- 

 ness and producing only male-bearing spermatozoa ; 

 (3) the grossulariata character cannot be borne by a 

 female-bearing gamete. 



Mr. W. Heape insisted that external circumstances, such' 

 as nutrition and general metabolism, could alter the pro- 

 portion of the sexes in the young born. 



Miss N. M. Stevens described her work on the spermato- 

 genesis of several insects, devoting particular attention to- 

 the heterotropic chromosomes, in regard to which she 

 confirmed Wilson's conclusions. 



Prof. Bateson described Miss Durham's experiments 

 with the cinnamon canary. When a cinnamon male is 

 paired with a green female, all the males are cinnamon 

 and the females green, but wh^n a cinnamon female is 

 paired with a green male all the offspring, of both sexes, 

 are green. He then proceeded to consider a similar but 

 less simple case, investigated by himself and Mr. Punnett, 

 namely, the silky fowl, in which two pairs of allelomorphic 

 characters are concerned in addition to the sex deter- 

 minants. Both these cases are explicable on similar lines 

 to those suggested for Abraxas. He g-ave instances of 

 sex-limited inheritance, such as colour-blindness and 

 hasmophilia in man, in which the males are affected and 

 can transmit, while unaffected males cannot, but unaffected 

 females may do so, the explanation being that the disease 

 is dominant in the male and recessive in the female. 



Dr. Copeman mentioned experiments which seemed to 

 suggest that chemical factors may be important in sex 

 determination, and a subsequent speaker referred to some 

 sixty cases of old hen pheasants assuming male plumage 

 as supporting the view that here it is the female v^hich is 

 heterozygous in sex, the male being homozygous, as no- 

 case of a male bird assuming female plumage was met 

 with. 



Account of the Recent Expedition to Lake Ourun. 

 Dr. W. A. Cunnington gave an account of the results 

 of the investigation, by Mr. C. L. Boulenger and himself, 

 of the Birket el Qurun in the Fayum province of Egypt. 

 The lake, though still of considerable size — twenty-five 

 miles long and five or six miles in maximum breadth — is 

 much smaller than formerly ; raised beaches are seen in 

 many parts, and the water is shallow (nowhere more 

 than 4 to 5 fathoms deep) and brackish. The lake was 

 found to be well stocked with animal life, although the 



