We have now established the bases for a practicable eugenics program. Men differ; these differences are inherited; therefore the make-up of the race can be changed by any method which will alter the relative proportions of the contributions which different classes of men make to the following generation.

For applied eugenics, it is sufficient to know that mental and physical differences are inherited; the exact manner of inheritance it would be important to know, but even without a knowledge of the details of the mechanism of heredity, a program of eugenics is yet wholly feasible.

It is no part of the plan of this book to enter into the details of the mechanism of heredity, a complicated subject for which the reader can refer to one of the treatises mentioned in the bibliography at the close of this volume. It may be worth while, however, to outline in a very summary way the present status of the question.

As to the details of inheritance, research has progressed in the last few years far beyond the crude conceptions of a decade ago, when a primitive form of Mendelism was made to explain everything that occurred.[43] One can hardly repress a smile at the simplicity of those early ideas,—though it must be said that some students of eugenics have not yet outgrown them. In those days it was thought that every visible character in man (or in any other organism) was represented by some "determiner" in the germ-plasm; that by suitable matings a breeder could rid a stream of germ-plasm of almost any determiner he wished; and that the corresponding unit character would thereupon disappear from the visible make-up of the individual. Was a family reported as showing a taint, for instance, hereditary insanity? Then it was asserted that by the proper series of matings, it was possible to squeeze out of the germ-plasm the particular concrete something of which insanity was the visible expression, and have left a family stock that was perfectly sound and sane.

The minute, meticulous researches of experimental breeders[44] have left such a view of heredity far behind. Certainly the last word has not been said; yet the present hypotheses work, whenever the conditions are such as to give a fair chance. The results of these studies have led to what is called the factorial hypothesis of heredity,[45] according to which all the visible characters of the adult are produced by (purely hypothetical) factors in the germ-plasm; it is the factors that are inherited, and they, under proper conditions for development, produce the characters. The great difference between this and the earlier view is that instead of allotting one factor to each character, students now believe that each individual character of the organism is produced by the action of an indefinitely large number of factors,[46] and they have been further forced to adopt the belief that each individual factor affects an indefinitely large number of characters, owing to the physiological interrelations and correlations of every part of the body.

The sweet pea offers a good illustration of the widespread effects which may result from the change of a single factor. In addition to the ordinary climbing vine, there is a dwarf variety, and the difference between the two seems to be proved, by exhaustive experimental breeding, to be due to only one inherited factor. Yet the action of this one factor not only changes the height of the plant, but also results in changes in color of foliage, length of internodes, size and arrangement of flowers, time of opening of flowers, fertility and viability.

Again, a mutant stock in the fruit fly (Drosophila) has as its most marked characteristic very short wings. "But the factor for rudimentary wings also produces other effects as well. The females are almost completely sterile, while the males are fertile. The viability of the stocks is poor. When flies with rudimentary wings are put into competition with wild flies relatively few of the rudimentary flies come through, especially if the culture is crowded. The hind legs are also shortened. All of these effects are the results of a single factor-difference." To be strictly accurate, then, one should not say that a certain variation affects length of wing, but that its chief effect is to shorten the wing.

"One may venture to guess," T. H. Morgan says,[47] "that some of the specific and varietal differences that are characteristic of wild types and which at the same time appear to have no survival value, are only by-products of factors whose most important effect is on another part of the organism where their influence is of vital importance."

"I am inclined to think," Professor Morgan continues, "that an overstatement to the effect that each factor may affect the entire body, is less likely to do harm than to state that each factor affects only a particular character. The reckless use of the phrase 'unit character' has done much to mislead the uninitiated as to the effects that a single change in the germ-plasm may produce on the organism. Fortunately the expression 'unit character' is being less used by those students of genetics who are more careful in regard to the implications of their terminology."

Fig. 17.—At the left is a hand with the third, fourth and fifth fingers affected. The middle joints of these fingers are stiff and cannot be bent. At the right the same hand is shown, closed. A normal hand in the middle serves to illustrate by contrast the nature of the abnormality, which appears in every generation of several large families. It is also called symphalangism, and is evidently related to the better-known abnormality of brachydactyly. Photograph from Frederick N. Duncan.

Fig. 18.—Squares denote males and circles females, as is usual in the charts compiled by eugenists; black circles or squares denote affected individuals. A1 had all fingers affected in the way shown in Fig. 17; B2 had all but one finger affected; C2 had all but one finger affected; D2 had all fingers affected; D3 has all but forefingers affected. The family here shown is a branch, found by F. N. Duncan, of a very large family first described by Harvey Cushing, in which this abnormality has run for at least seven generations. It is an excellent example of an inherited defect due to a single Mendelian factor.

One of the best attested single characters in human heredity is brachydactyly, "short-fingerness," which results in a reduction in the length of the fingers by the dropping out of one joint. If one lumps together all the cases where any effect of this sort is found, it is evident that normals never transmit it to their posterity, that affected persons always do, and that in a mating between a normal and an affected person, all the offspring will show the abnormality. It is a good example of a unit character.

But its effect is by no means confined to the fingers. It tends to affect the entire skeleton, and in a family where one child is markedly brachydactylous, that child is generally shorter than the others. The factor for brachydactyly evidently produces its primary effect on the bones of the hand, but it also produces a secondary effect on all the bones of the body.

Moreover, it will be found, if a number of brachydactylous persons are examined, that no two of them are affected to exactly the same degree. In some cases only one finger will be abnormal; in other cases there will be a slight effect in all the fingers; in other cases all the fingers will be highly affected. Why is there such variation in the results produced by a unit character? Because, presumably, in each individual there is a different set of modifying factors or else a variation in the factor. It has been found that an abnormality quite like brachydactyly is produced by abnormality in the pituitary gland. It is then fair to suppose that the factor which produces brachydactyly does so by affecting the pituitary gland in some way. But there must be many other factors which also affect the pituitary and in some cases probably favor its development, rather than hindering it. Then if the factor for brachydactyly is depressing the pituitary, but if some other factors are at the same time stimulating that gland, the effect shown in the subject's fingers will be much less marked than if a group of modifying factors were present which acted in the same direction as the brachydactyly factor,—to perturb the action of the pituitary gland.

This illustration is largely hypothetical; but there is no room for doubt that every factor produces more than a single effect. A white blaze in the hair, for example, is a well-proved unit factor in man; the factor not only produces a white streak in the hair, but affects the pigmentation of the skin as well, usually resulting in one or more white spots on some part of the body. It is really a factor for "piebaldism."

For the sake of clear thinking, then, the idea of a unit character due to some unit determiner or factor in the germ-plasm must be given up, and it must be recognized that every visible character of an individual is the result of numerous factors, or differences in the germ-plasm. Ordinarily one of these produces a more notable contribution to the end-product than do the others; but there are cases where this statement does not appear to hold good. This leads to the conception of multiple factors.

In crossing a wheat with brown chaff and one with white chaff, H. Nilsson-Ehle (1909) expected in the second hybrid generation to secure a ratio of 3 brown to 1 white. As a fact, he got 1410 brown and 94 white, a ratio of 15:1. He interpreted this as meaning that the brown color in this particular variety was due not to one factor, but to two, which were equivalent to each other, and either one of which would produce the same result alone as would the two acting together. In further crossing red wheat with white, he secured ratios which led him to believe that the red was produced by three independent factors, any one of which would produce red either alone or with the other two. A. and G. Howard later corroborated this work,[48] but showed that the three factors were not identical: they are qualitatively slightly different, although so closely similar that the three reds look alike at first sight. E. M. East has obtained evidence from maize and G. H. Shull from shepherd's-purse, which bears out the multiple factor hypothesis.

Fig. 19.—The white lock of hair here shown is hereditary and has been traced back definitely through six generations; family tradition derives it from a son of Harry "Hot-Spur" Percy, born in 1403, and fallaciously assigns its origin to "prenatal influence" or "maternal impression." This young woman inherited the blaze from her father, who had it from his mother, who had it from her father, who migrated from England to America nearly a century ago. The trait appears to be a simple dominant, following Mendel's Law; that is, when a person with one of these locks who is a child of one normal and one affected parent marries a normal individual, half of the children show the lock and half do not. Photograph from Newton Miller.

Fig. 20.—The piebald factor sometimes shows itself as nothing more than a blaze in the hair (see preceding figure); but it may take a much more extreme form, as illustrated by the above photograph from Q. I. Simpson and W. E. Castle. Mrs. S. A., a spotted mutant, founded a family which now comprises, in several generations, 17 spotted and 16 normal offspring. The white spotting factor behaves as a Mendelian dominant, and the expectation would be equal numbers of normal and affected children. Similar white factors are known in other animals. It is worth noting that all the well attested Mendelian characters in man are abnormalities, no normal character having yet been proved to be inherited in this manner.

Apart from multiple factors as properly defined (that is, factors which produce the same result, either alone or together), extensive analysis usually reveals that apparently simple characters are in reality complex. The purple aleurone color of maize seeds is attributed by R. A. Emerson to five distinct factors, while E. Baur found four factors responsible for the red color of snapdragon blossoms. There are, as G. N. Collins says,[49] "still many gross characters that stand as simple Mendelian units, but few, if any, of these occur in plants or animals that have been subjected to extensive investigation. There is now such a large number of characters which at first behaved as units, but which have since been broken up by crossing with suitable selected material, that it seems not unreasonable to believe that the remaining cases await only the discovery of the right strains with which to hybridize them to bring about corresponding results."

In spite of the fact that there is a real segregation between factors as has been shown, it must not be supposed that factors and their determiners are absolutely invariable. This has been too frequently assumed without adequate evidence by many geneticists. It is probable that just as the multiplicity and interrelation and minuteness of many factors have been the principal discoveries of genetics in recent years that the next few years will see a great deal of evidence following the important lead of Castle and Jennings, as to variation in factors.

Knowing that all the characters of an individual are due to the interaction of numerous factors, one must be particularly slow in assuming that such complex characters as man's mental traits are units, in any proper genetic sense of the word. It will, for instance, require very strong evidence to establish feeble-mindedness as a unit character. No one who examines the collected pedigrees of families marked by feeble-mindedness, can deny that it does appear at first sight to behave as a unit character, inherited in the typical Mendelian fashion. The psychologist H. H. Goddard, who started out with a strong bias against believing that such a complex trait could even behave as a unit character, thought himself forced by the tabulation of his cases to adopt the conclusion that it does behave as a unit character. And other eugenists have not hesitated to affirm, mainly on the strength of Dr. Goddard's researches, that this unit character is due to a single determiner in the germ-plasm, which either is or is not present,—no halfway business about it.

How were these cases of feeble-mindedness defined? The definition is purely arbitrary. Ordinarily, any adult who tests much below 12 years by the Binet-Simon scale is held to be feeble-minded; and the results of this test vary a little with the skill of the person applying it and with the edition of the scale used. Furthermore, most of the feeble-minded cases in institutions, where the Mendelian studies have usually been made, come from families which are themselves of a low grade of mentality. If the whole lot of those examined were measured, it would be difficult to draw the line between the normals and the affected; there is not nearly so much difference between the two classes, as one would suppose who only looks at a Mendelian chart.

Fig. 21.—The palms of the hands and soles of the feet are covered with little ridges or corrugations, which are supposed to be useful in preventing the grasp from slipping; whence the name of friction-skin has been given to these surfaces. The ridges are developed into various patterns; the one above is a loop on the left forefinger. The ridges are studded with the openings of the sweat glands, the elevated position of which is supposed to prevent them from being clogged up; further, the moisture which they secrete perhaps adds to the friction of the skin. Friction-skin patterns are inherited in some degree. Photograph by John Howard Payne.

Fig. 22.—Print of a finger-tip showing a loop-pattern, enlarged about eight times. This is a common type of pattern, and at first glance the reader may think it could be mistaken for one of his own. There are, however, at least sixty-five "ridge characteristics" on the above print, which an expert would recognize and would use for the purpose of identification. If it were found that the first two or three of them noted corresponded to similar characteristics on another print, the expert would have no doubt that the two prints were made by the same finger. In police bureaus, finger-prints are filed for reference with a classification based on the type of pattern, number of ridges between two given points, etc.; and a simple formula results which makes it easy to find all prints which bear a general resemblance to each other. The exact identity or lack of it is then determined by a comparison of such minutiÆ as the sixty-five above enumerated. While the general outline of a pattern is inherited, these small characters do not seem to be, but are apparently rather due to the stretching of the skin as it grows. Illustration from J. H. Taylor.

Fig. 23.—Diagram showing the mentality of 905 unselected children, 5 to 14 years of age, who may probably be taken as representative of the whole population. The median or tallest column, about one-third of the whole number, represents those who were normal or, as a statistician would say, mediocre. Their mental ages and chronological ages were practically identical. To the left of these the diminishing columns show the number whose mental ages fell short of their chronological ages. They are the mentally retarded, ranging all the way down to the lowest one-third of one per cent who represent a very low grade of feeble-mindedness. On the other side the mentally superior show a similar distribution. A curve drawn over the tops of the columns makes a good normal curve. "Since the frequency of the various grades of intelligence decreases gradually and at no point abruptly on each side of the median, it is evident that there is no definite dividing line between normality and feeble-mindedness, or between normality and genius. Psychologically, the mentally defective child does not belong to a distinct type, nor does the genius.... The common opinion that extreme deviations below the median are vastly more frequent than extreme deviations above the median seems to have no foundation in fact. Among unselected school children, at least, for every child of any given degree of deficiency there is roughly another child as far above the average as the former is below." Lewis M. Terman, The Measurement of Intelligence, pp. 66-67.

It would be well to extend our view by measuring a whole population with one of the standard tests. If the intelligence of a thousand children picked at random from the population be measured, it will prove (as outlined in Chapter III) that some of them are feeble-minded, some are precocious or highly intelligent; and that there is every possible degree of intelligence between the two extremes. If a great number of children, all 10 years old, were tested for intelligence, it would reveal a few absolute idiots whose intelligence was no more than that of the ordinary infant, a few more who were as bright as the ordinary kindergarten child, and so up to the great bulk of normal 10-year-olds, and farther to a few prize eugenic specimens who had as much intelligence as the average college freshman. In other words, this trait of general intelligence would be found distributed through the population in accordance with that same curve of chance, which was discussed and illustrated when we were talking about the differences between individuals.

Now what has become of the unit character, feeble-mindedness? How can one speak of a unit character, when the "unit" has an infinite number of values? Is a continuous quantity a unit?

If intelligence is due to the inheritance of a vast, but indeterminate, number of factors of various kinds, each of which is independent, knowledge of heredity would lead one to expect that some children would get more of these factors than others and that, broadly speaking, no two would get the same number. All degrees of intelligence between the idiot and the genius would thus exist; and yet we can not doubt that a few of these factors are more important than the others, and the presence of even one or two of them may markedly affect the level of intelligence.

It may make the matter clearer if we return for a moment to the physical. Height, bodily stature, offers a very good analogy for the case we have just been discussing, because it is obvious that it must depend on a large number of different factors, a man's size being due to the sum total of the sizes of a great number of bones, ligaments, tissues, etc. It is obvious that one can be long in the trunk and short in the legs, or vice versa, and so on through a great number of possible combinations. Here is a perfectly measurable character (no one has ever claimed that it is a genetic "unit character" in man although it behaves as such in some plants) as to the complex basis of which all will agree. And it is known, from common observation as well as from pedigree studies, that it is not inherited as a unit: children are never born in two discontinuous classes, "tall" and "short," as they are with color blindness or normal color vision, for example. Is it not a fair assumption that the difference between the apparent unit character of feeble-mindedness, and the obvious non-unit character of height, is a matter of difference in the number of factors involved, difference in the degree to which they hang together in transmission, variation in the factors, and certainly difference in the method of measurement? Add that the line between normal and feeble-minded individuals is wholly arbitrary, and it seems that there is little reason to talk about feeble-mindedness as a unit character. It may be true that there is some sort of an inhibiting factor inherited as a unit, but it seems more likely that feeble-mindedness may be due to numerous different causes; that its presence in one child is due to one factor or group of factors, and in another child to a different one.[50]

It does not fall wholly into the class of blending inheritance, for it does segregate to a considerable extent, yet some of the factors may show blending. Much more psychological analysis must be done before the question of the inheritance of feeble-mindedness can be considered solved. But at present one can say with confidence of this, as of other mental traits, that like tends to produce like; that low grades of mentality usually come from an ancestry of low mentality, and that bright children are usually produced in a stock that is marked by intelligence.

Most mental traits are even more complex in appearance than feeble-mindedness. None has yet been proved to be due to a single germinal difference, and it is possible that none will ever be so demonstrated.

Intensive genetic research in lower animals and plants has shown that a visible character may be due to

1. Independent multiple factors in the germ-plasm, as in the case of wheat mentioned a few pages back.

2. Multiple allelomorphs, that is, a series of different grades of a single factor.

3. One distinct Mendelian factor (or several such factors), with modifying factors which may cause either (a) intensification, (b) inhibition, or (c) dilution.

4. Variation of a factor.

5. Or several or all of the above explanations may apply to one case.

Moreover, the characters of which the origin has been most completely worked out are mostly color characters, whose physiological development seems to be relatively simple. It is probable that the development of a mental character is much more complicated, and therefore there is more likelihood of additional factors being involved.

To say, then, that any mental trait is a unit character, or that it is due to a single germinal difference, is to go beyond both the evidence and the probabilities.

And if mental traits are, in their germinal foundations, not simple but highly complex, it follows that any advice given as to how human matings should be arranged to produce any precise result in the progeny, should be viewed with distrust. Such advice can be given only in the case of a few pathological characters such as color-blindness, night-blindness, or Huntington's Chorea. It is well that the man or woman interested in one of these abnormalities can get definite information on the subject; and Huntington's Chorea, in particular, is a dysgenic trait which can and should be stamped out. But it can not be pretended that any of man's traits, as to whose inheritance prediction can be made with confidence, is of great importance to national eugenics.

In short, a knowledge of heredity shows that attempts to predict the mode of inheritance of the important human traits (particularly mental traits) are still uncertain in their results. The characters involved are too complex to offer any simple sequences. If two parents have brown eyes, it can not be said that all their children will have brown eyes; still less can it be said that all the children of two musically gifted parents are certain to be endowed with musical talent in any given degree.

Prediction is possible only when uniform sequences are found. How are such sequences to be found in heredity, if they do not appear when a parent and his offspring are examined? Obviously it is necessary to examine a large number of parents and their offspring,—to treat the problem by statistical methods.

But, it may be objected, a uniformity gained by such methods is spurious. It is merely shutting the eyes to the mass of contradictions which are concealed by an apparent statistical uniformity.

This objection would be valid, if the statistical results were used for prediction in individual cases. The statistician, however, expressly warns that his conclusions must not be used for such prediction. They are intended to predict only general trends, only average results; and for this purpose they are wholly legitimate. Moreover, evolution itself is a problem of statistics, and therefore the statistical method of studying heredity may offer results of great value to eugenics, even though it can not furnish in individual cases the prediction which would be desirable.

From this standpoint, we return to attack the problem of the relation between parent and offspring. We noted that there is no uniform sequence in a single family, and illustrated this by the case of brown eyes. But if a thousand parents and their offspring be selected and some trait, such as eye-color, or stature, or general intelligence, be measured, a uniformity at once appears in the fact of regression. Its discoverer, Sir Francis Galton, gives this account of it:

Fig. 25.—Above are the finger-prints, supplied by J. H. Taylor of the Navy Department, of the two young sailors shown in Fig. 24. The reader might examine them once or twice without seeing any differences. Systematic comparison reveals that the thumbs of the left hands and the middle fingers of the right hands particularly are distinguishable. Finger-prints as a means of identification were popularized by Sir Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, and their superiority to all other methods is now generally admitted. In addition to this practical usefulness, they also furnish material for study of the geneticist and zoÖlogist. The extent to which heredity is responsible for the patterns is indicated by the resemblance in pattern in spite of the great variability in this tract.

"If the word 'peculiarity' be used to signify the difference between the amount of any faculty possessed by a man, and the average of that possessed by the population at large, then the law of regression may be described as follows: each peculiarity in a man is shared by his kinsmen, but on the average in a less degree. It is reduced to a definite fraction of its amount, quite independently of what its amount might be. The fraction differs in different orders of kinship, becoming smaller as they are more remote. When the kinship is so distant that its effects are not worth taking into account, the peculiarity of the man, however remarkable it may have been, is reduced to zero in his kinsmen. This apparent paradox is fundamentally due to the greater frequency of mediocre deviations than of extreme ones, occurring between limits separated by equal widths."

As to the application of this law, let Galton himself speak: "The Law of Regression tells heavily against the full hereditary transmission of any gift. Only a few out of many children would be likely to differ from mediocrity so widely as their Mid-Parent [i. e., the average of their two parents], allowing for sexual differences, and still fewer would differ as widely as the more exceptional of the two parents. The more bountifully the parent is gifted by nature, the more rare will be his good fortune if he begets a son who is as richly endowed as himself, and still more so if he has a son who is endowed yet more largely. But the law is evenhanded; it levies an equal succession-tax on the transmission of badness as of goodness. If it discourages the extravagant hopes of a gifted parent that his children on the average will inherit all his powers, it not less discountenances extravagant fears that they will inherit all his weakness and disease.

"It must be clearly understood that there is nothing in these statements to invalidate the general doctrine that the children of a gifted pair are much more likely to be gifted than the children of a mediocre pair." To this it should be added that progeny of very great ability will arise more frequently in proportion to the quality of their parents.

It must be reiterated that this is a statistical, not a biological, law; and that even Galton probably goes a little too far in applying it to individuals. It will hold good for a whole population, but not necessarily for only one family. Further, we can afford to reËmphasize the fact that it in no way prevents the improvement of a race by selection and assortative mating.

Stature is the character which Dr. Galton used to get an exact measurement of the amount of regression. More recent studies have changed the value he found, without invalidating his method. When large numbers are taken it is now abundantly proved that if parents exceed the average stature of their race by a certain amount their offspring will, in general, exceed the racial average by only one-half as much as their parents did. This is due, as Galton said, to the "drag" of the more remote ancestry, which when considered as a whole must represent very nearly mediocrity, statistically speaking.

The general amount of regression in heredity, then, is one-half. If it be expressed as a decimal, .5, the reader will at once note its identity with the coefficient of correlation which we have so often cited in this book as a measure of heredity. In fact, the coefficient of correlation is nothing more than a measure of the regression, and it is probably simpler to think of it as correlation than it is to speak of a Law of Regression, as Sir Francis did.

This correlation or regression can, of course, be measured for other ancestors as well as for the immediate parents. From studies of eye-color in man and coat-color in horses, Karl Pearson worked out the necessary correlations, which are usually referred to as the law of Ancestral Inheritance. Dr. Galton had pointed out, years before, that the contributions of the several generations of individuals probably formed a geometrical series, and Professor Pearson calculated this series, for the two cases mentioned, as:

In other words, the two parents, together, will on the average of a great many cases be found to have contributed a little more than three-fifths of the hereditary peculiarities of any given individual; the four grandparents will be found responsible for a little less than one-fifth, and the eight great-grandparents for about six hundredths, and so on, the contribution of each generation becoming smaller with ascent, but each one having, in the average of many cases, a certain definite though small influence, until infinity.

It can not be too strongly emphasized that this is a statistical law, not a biological law. It must not be applied to predict the character of the offspring of any one particular mating, for it might be highly misleading. It would be wholly unjustified, for example, to suppose that a certain man got three-tenths of his nature from his father, because the Law of Ancestral Heredity required it: in point of fact, he might get one-tenth or nine-tenths, none or all of a given trait. But, when dealing with a large population, the errors on one side balance the errors on the other, and the law is found, in the cases to which it has been applied, to express the facts.[51]

While, therefore, this Galton-Pearson law gives no advice in regard to individual marriages, it is yet of great value to applied eugenics. In the first place, it crystallizes the vague realization that remote ancestry is of much less importance than immediate ancestry, to an individual, while showing that every generation has a part in making a man what he is. In the second place, it is found, by mathematical reasoning which need not here be repeated, that the type of a population may be quickly changed by the mating of like with like; and that this newly established type may be maintained when not capable of further progress. Regression is not inevitable, for it may be overcome by selection.

To put the matter in a more concrete form, there is reason to think that if for a few generations superior people would marry only people on the average superior in like degree (superior in ancestry as well as individuality), a point would be reached where all the offspring would tend to be superior, mediocrities of the former type being eliminated; and this superiority could be maintained as long as care was taken to avoid mating with inferior. In other words, the Galton-Pearson Law gives statistical support for a belief that eugenic marriages will create an improved breed of men. And this, it seems to us, is the most important implication of that law for eugenics, although it is an implication that is generally ignored.

We do not propose to discuss further the laws of heredity; but it is likely that the reader who has made no other study of the subject may by this time find himself somewhat bewildered. "Can we talk only in generalities?" he may well ask; "Does eugenics know no laws of heredity that will guide me in the choice of a wife? I thought that was the purpose of eugenics!"

We reply: (1) The laws of heredity are vastly complicated in man by the complex nature of most of his characters. The definite way in which some abnormalities are inherited is known; but it has not been thought necessary to include an account of such facts in this work. They are set forth in other books, especially Davenport's Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. The knowledge of how such a trait as color-blindness is inherited may be of importance to one man out of a thousand in choosing a wife; but we are taking a broader view of eugenics than this. As far as the great mass of human characters go, they are, in our opinion, due to so many separately inheritable factors that it is not safe to dogmatize about exactly how they will behave in heredity. Such knowledge, desirable as it may be, is not necessary for race progress.

(2) But it is possible, with present knowledge, to say that human traits, mental as well as physical, are inherited, in a high degree. Even before the final details as to the inheritance of all traits are worked out—a task that is never likely to be accomplished—there is ample material on which to base action for eugenics. The basal differences in the mental traits of man (and the physical as well, of course) are known to be due to heredity, and little modified by training. It is therefore possible to raise the level of the human race—the task of eugenics—by getting that half of the race which is, on the whole, superior in the traits that make for human progress and happiness, to contribute a larger proportion to the next generation than does the half which is on the whole inferior in that respect. Eugenics need know nothing more, and the smoke of controversy over the exact way in which some trait or other is inherited must not be allowed for an instant to obscure the known fact that the level can be raised.