638 IMPROVEMENT OF LIVING THINGS BY MAN 



segregate the feeble-minded according to sexes in asylums and to 

 prevent their marriage and the possibilities of perpetuating a low 

 and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried suc- 

 cessfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in various 

 parts of this country. 



Traits that are inherited. Eugenics shows us, on the other hand, 

 in a study of families in which brilliant men and women are found, 

 that the descendants have received good, inheritance from their 

 ancestors. 



The following, taken from Davenport's Heredity in Relation 

 to Eugenics, illustrates how one family has been famous in American 

 history. 



In 1667 Elizabeth Tuttle, " of strong will and of extreme intel- 

 lectual vigor, married Richard Edwards of Hartford, Conn., a 

 man of high repute and great erudition. From their one son 

 descended another son, Jonathan Edwards, a noted divine and 

 president of Princeton College. Of the descendants of Jonathan 

 Edwards much has been written ; a brief catalogue must suffice : 

 Jonathan Edwards, Jr., president of Union College; Timothy 

 Dwight, president of Yale ; Sereno Edwards Dwight, president of 

 Hamilton College; Theodore Dwight Woolsey, for twenty-five 

 years president of Yale College ; Sarah, wife of Tapping Reeve, 

 founder of Litchfield Law School, herself no mean lawyer ; Daniel 

 Tyler, a general in the Civil War and founder of the iron industries 

 of North Alabama; Timothy Dwight, second, president of Yale 

 University from 1886 to 1898 ; Theodore William Dwight, founder 

 and for thirty-three years warden of Columbia Law School; 

 Henrietta Frances, wife of Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, 

 who, burning the midnight oil by the side of her ingenious husband, 

 helped him to his enduring fame ; Merrill Edwards Gates, president 

 of Amherst College ; Catherine Maria Sedgwick, of graceful pen ; 

 Charles Sedgwick Minot, authority on biology and embryology in 

 the Harvard Medical School ; Edith Kermit Carew, wife of 

 Theodore Roosevelt; and Winston Churchill, the author of 

 Coniston and other well-known novels." 



The daughters of Elizabeth Tuttle had distinguished descend- 

 ants : Robert Treat Paine, signer of the Declaration of Inde- 



