BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 353 



tenance of many of the inferior and all the defective members of his 

 species. The inferior freely multiply, and the defective, if their 

 defects be not so grave as to lead to their detention in prisons or 

 asylums, multiply also without restraint. Heredity being strict in its 

 action, the consequences are in civilized countries much what they 

 would be in the kennels of the dog-breeder who continued to preserve 

 all his puppies, good and bad : the proportion of defectives increases. 

 The increase is so considerable that outside every great city there is 

 a smaller town inhabited by defectives and those who wait on them. 

 Eound London we have a ring of such towns with some 30,000 in- 

 habitants, of whom about 28,000 are defective, largely, though of course 

 by no means entirely, bred from previous generations of defectives. 

 Now, it is not for us to consider practical measures. As men of 

 science we observe natural events and deduce conclusions from them. 

 I may perhaps be allowed to say that the remedies proposed in 

 America, in so far as they aim at the eugenic regulation of marriage 

 on a comprehensive scale, strike me as devised without regard to the 

 needs either of individuals or of a modern State. Undoubtedly if 

 they decide to breed their population of one uniform puritan grey, 

 they can do it in a few generations ; but I doubt if timid respec- 

 tability will make a nation happy, and I am sure that qualities of a 

 different sort are needed if it is to compete with more vigorous and 

 more varied communities. Everyone must have a preliminary sym- 

 pathy with the aims of eugenists both abroad and at home. Their 

 efforts at the least are doing something to discover and spread truth 

 as to the physiological structure of society. The spirit of such organi- 

 zations, however, almost of necessity suffers from a bias towards the 

 accepted and the ordinary, and if they had power it would go hard 

 with many ingredients of Society that could be ill-spared. I notice 

 an ominous passage in which even Galton, the founder of eugenics, 

 feeling perhaps some twinge of his Quaker ancestry, remarks that 

 " as the Bohemianism in the nature of our race is destined to perish, 

 the sooner it goes, the happier for mankind." It is not the eugenists 

 who will give us what Plato has called divine releases from the 

 common ways. If some fancier with the catholicity of Shakespeare 

 would take us in hand, well and good ; but I would not trust even 

 Shakespeares meeting as a committee. Let us remember that 

 Beethoven's father was an habitual drunkard and that his mother 

 died of consumption. From the genealogy of the patriarchs also we 

 learn — what may very well be the truth — that the fathers of such as 

 dwell in tents, and of all such as handle the harp or organ, and the 

 instructor of every artificer in brass and iron — the founders, that is 

 to say, of the arts and the sciences — came in direct descent from 

 Cain, and not in the posterity of the irreproachable Seth, who is to 

 us, as he probably was also in the narrow circle of his own contem- 

 poraries, what naturalists call a nomen nudum. 



Genetic research will make it possible for a nation to elect by 

 what sort of beings it will be represented not very many generations 

 hence, much as a farmer can decide whether his byres shall be full 

 of shorthorns or Herefords. It will be very surprising indeed if 



Zool. 4th ser. vol. XVIII., September, 1914. 2 e 



