NEO-DARWINIAN SOCIOLOGISTS 93 
looking, therefore, at the range of qualities fixed by selection and 
transmitted by heredity.” 4 
In Hereditary Genius Galton endeavored to trace the in- 
fluence of heredity in the transmission of high mental ability, but 
succeeded in showing only a correlation without separating the 
factors of “nature”? and “nurture ”’; yet in his discussion of 
Influences that Affect the Natural Ability of Nations, he assumes 
that he has shown that the qualities are hereditary rather than 
due to environment. “TI shall have occasion to show,” he says, 
“that certain influences retard the average age of marriage, while 
others hasten it; . . . that an enormous effect upon the average 
natural ability of a race may be produced by means of those 
influences. I shall argue that the wisest policy is that which 
results in retarding the average age of marriage among the weak 
and in hastening it among the vigorous classes; whereas, most 
unhappily for us, the influence of numerous social agencies has 
been strongly and banefully exerted in precisely the opposite 
direction.” 2 He discusses not only the effect of the age of 
marriage, but also of religious persecution and celibacy both of 
the priesthood and of a type of scholastics,? and bases his con- 
clusion on the innate differences between the various classes in 
English society and their value to the race-stock. Now he has 
not proven that the lower economic classes or those who by 
intellectual tests stand lowest are innately inferior to the higher, 
yet the whole value of his argument rests on this and on the 
correlation between physical vigor and the possession of those 
qualities which make for national strength. In truth, in his 
prefatory chapter to the edition of 1892 where he takes his stand 
on Weismannism, he confuses those qualities of mind and char- 
acter which may be purely psycho-social, as in the illustration 
given from the French Huguenots, and those that pertain to the 
germ plasm. The same confusion is to be noted in his discussion 
of The Comparative Worth of Different Races. He holds that the 
1 Laboratory Lecture Series, no. vii, pp. 4 £. 
2 Hereditary Genius, p. 339 (italics ours). 
3 [bid., pp. 343 f. Yet he admits that celibacy is favorable to eminence, hence to 
the production of those utilities which make for national strength, ibid., p. 320. 
4 Tbid., p. xxiii. 
