8 THE TREND OF THE RACE 
insufficient for the solution of particular problems the defects may 
often be remedied by collecting additional information. Many 
questions of paramount importance are capable of solution by the 
use of the biometrical methods employed by Pearson and his 
co-workers of the Galton laboratory. What we need above all is 
investigation. And it is important that we realize that investiga- 
tion of the trend of human development is peculiarly timely. Our 
custom of regarding evolution as an exceedingly slow process in 
which a few centuries more or less count for relatively little 
should not make us unmindful of the fact that important racial 
modifications may at times take place in a very few generations. 
For an illustration of this fact it is only necessary to allude to the 
remarkable results which have been achieved, even within a few 
years, by the selective breeding of plantsand animals. Many lines 
of evidence point to the conclusion that our human inheritance is 
changing at a comparatively rapid rate. In a species containing 
the great diversity of hereditary qualities which is exhibited by 
mankind there are abundant possibilities of rapid transformation. 
A person with our present knowledge of human heredity and en- 
dowed with the authority which the Great Master in Campanella’s 
City of the Sun exercised over the matings of men and women, 
could produce, in a few generations, a remarkable array of diverse 
types. He could, for instance, breed an albino race, a deaf race, 
a feeble-minded race, an insane race, a race of dwarfs, a race with 
hook-like extremities instead of hands, a race of superior intellec- 
tual ability, or a race of high artistic talent. It may be said that 
such changes as may occur in a few generations affect merely the 
prevalence of characteristics already present, or the making of 
different combinations of existing hereditary factors. But from 
the standpoint of human welfare the importance even of such 
changes is tremendous. They may make all the difference 
between a breed of wretched degenerates and a race of physical 
vigor and superior mentality. The human species possessing so 
great a diversity of hereditary traits and subjected to the in- 
fluences of so many changing forces both physical and social can 
scarcely fail to undergo more or less rapid modification. If our 
