THE PROMISE OF RACE CULTURE 499 
take the family which produced Charles Darwin, the discoverer of the 
fundamental principle of eugenics, and his first cousin, Francis Galton. 
Darwin’s grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, physician, poet and 
philosopher, and independent expounder of the doctrine of organic 
evolution. Darwin’s father was a distinguished physician, described 
by his son as “the wisest man I ever knew.’ Darwin’s maternal 
grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood, the famous founder of the pottery 
works. Amongst his first cousins is Mr. Francis Galton. He has five 
living sons, each a man of great distinction, including Mr. Francis 
Darwin and Sir George Darwin, both of them original thinkers, 
honored by the presidency of the British Association. No one will 
put such a case as this down to pure chance or to the influence of 
environment alone. This is evidently, like many others, a greatly 
distinguished stock. The worth of such families to a nation is wholly 
beyond any one’s powers of estimation. What if Erasmus Darwin 
had never married! 
No student of human heredity can doubt that, however limited 
our immediate hopes, facts such as those alluded to furnish promise 
of great things for the future. But let us turn now from genius to 
what we usually call talent. 
The production of talent.—There can be no question that amongst 
the promises of race-culture is the possibility of breeding such things 
as talent and the mental energy upon which talent so largely depends. 
In the Inquiries into Human Faculty, Mr. Galton shows the remark- 
able extent to which energy or the capacity for labor underlies intellec- 
tual achievement. He says, of energy: 
“Tt is consistent with all the robust virtues, and makes a large 
practice of them possible. It is the measure of fullness of life; the more 
energy the more abundance of it; no energy at all is death; idiots are 
feeble and listless. In the enquiries I made on the antecedents of men 
of science no points came out more strongly than that the leaders of 
scientific thought were generally gifted with remarkable energy, and 
that they had inherited the gift of it from their parents and grand- 
parents..... It maybe objected that if the race were too healthyand 
energetic there would be insufficient call for the exercise of the pitying 
and self-denying virtues, and the character of men would grow harder 
in consequence. But it does not seem reasonable to preserve sickly 
breeds for the sole purpose of tending them, as the breed of foxes is 
preserved solely for sport and its attendant advantages. There is 
little fear that misery will ever cease from the land, or that the 
