2o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



absent the treatment will avail little or nothing. Upon the children 

 of the " Zero " family the priest-school was without effect. The time 

 and pains required for reformation will, in any case, depend on innate 

 qualities of the delinquent. 



In respect to talent the importance of both blood and training is 

 generally recognized. Many "lightning calculators" and mathema- 

 tical prodigies are born and are not at all the product of training, yet 

 training improves the gift for mathematical abstractions. In the 

 realm of vocal and instrumental music the same is true. Even the 

 prima donna must be trained. Though the Bach family contained 

 musicians for eight generations, and twenty-nine eminent ones assem- 

 bled at one family gathering, still training no doubt added to the value 

 of their performances, at the same time that their inborn capacity 

 rendered them apt scholars. 



The objection has been raised, as we have seen, to recognizing that 

 heredity has any considerable importance in determining unfavorable 

 results, on the ground that it is a pessimistic and fatalistic doctrine. 

 Euthenics, on the other hand, offers opportunity to do something to 

 improve a person's condition. Apart from the fact that the truth must 

 be faced whether pleasant or not, the contention can not be too strongly 

 urged that improvement of conditions is only palliative, while improve- 

 ment of blood is essential to permanent progress. Our only hope, 

 indeed, for the real betterment of the human race is in better matings. 

 If any one doubts this let him ask the agriculturalist. Let him ask 

 the Florida orange grower, who no longer fears the frost, if heredity is 

 a " terrible " fact ; let him ask the " dry farmer " of Montana, who 

 cultivates his special varieties that require little rain, if heredity gives 

 him the blues; let him ask the breeder of improved Holstein cattle 

 whether he would, if he could, annihilate the fact of transmission of 

 qualities; they would laugh in your face; they would assure you that 

 heredity is their main reliance and their -most precious tool. So to the 

 eugenist heredity stands as the one great hope of the human race; its 

 savior from imbecility, poverty, disease, immorality. But, to be effect- 

 ive, the available salvation must be accepted. By some means or other 

 the principles of eugenics already known, and those which studies now 

 being undertaken will surely reveal, must be applied in marriage selec- 

 tion. To-day, marriage is controlled imperfectly, crudely, by social 

 ideals. Incest, cousin marriages, the marriage of defectives and tuber- 

 culous persons, are, in wide circles, taboo. This fact affords the basis 

 for the hope that, when the method of securing strong offspring, even 

 from partially defective stock — and where is the strain without any 

 defect? — is widely known, the teachings of science in respect even to 

 marriage matings will be widely regarded and that in the generations 

 to come the teachings and practise of euthenics will yield the greater 

 result because of the previous practise of the principles of eugenics. 



