Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/23

 EUGENICS 1 1

poor and probably of the average respectable person. Many eminent criminals appear to me to be persons superior in many respects in intelligence, initiative, originality to the average judge. I will confess I have never known either.

Let me suggest that Dr. Galton's concession to the fact that there are differences of type to consider is only the beginning of a very big descent of concession, that may finally carry him very deep indeed. Eugenics, which is really only a new word for the popular American term " stirpiculture," seems to me to be a term that is not without its misleading implications. It has in it some- thing of that same lack of a fine appreciation of facts that enabled Herbert Spencer to coin those two most unfortunate terms, " evolution " and " the sur- vival of the fittest." The implication is that the best reproduces and survives. Now really it is the better that survives, and not the best. The real fact of the case is that in the all-around result the inferior usually perish, and the average of the species rises, but not that any exceptionally favorable variations get together and reproduce. I believe that now and always the conscious selection of the best for reproduction will be impossible ; that to propose it is to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what individuality implies. The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.

BY DK. ROBERT HUTCHISON.

My only claim to address a meeting on this subject is that not only, in common with all physicians, am I acquainted with the factors that make for physical deterioration, but I have devoted special attention to certain factors which I believe play a large part in the production of human types. I refer to feeding. I believe we have, in treating this subject, to consider two lines in which a society like this might work. It has to consider, first, the raw material of the race and that I believe to be the view which commends itself especially to Dr. Galton and, second, the conditions under which that raw material grows up. I believe, speaking as a physician, and judging from the raw material one sees, for example, in the children's hospitals, that it is not so necessary to improve the raw material, which is not so very bad after all, as it is to improve the environ- ment in which the raw material is brought up. Of all the factors in that environ- ment, that which is of the greatest importance in promoting bad physical and bad mental development is, I believe, the food factor. If you would give me a free hand in feeding, during infancy and from ten to eighteen years of age, the raw material that is being produced, I would guarantee to give you quite a satisfactory race as the result. And I think we should do more wisely in concentrating our attention on things such as those, than in losing ourselves in a mass of scientific questions relating to heredity, about which, it must be admitted, in regard to the human race, we are still profoundly in ignorance.

EY DR. WARNER.

When I had the pleasure of reading the proof of Mr. Galton's paper, I devoted what time I could to thinking carefully over what might be expected to be the practical outcome of what I had understood from that paper, if I had read it aright. And a careful reading of Mr. Galton's paper shows that he purposely deals with only a portion of the means of developing a good nation, and that portion is marriage selection. I also gather that the tendency of the paper is to advocate the marriage between those who are most highly evolved in their respective families. But there is a point in this connection which I think is apt to be overlooked, and that is the examples we have of dangers from intermarriage between highly evolved members of two families. A considerable number of degenerates come under my observation and come to me professionally. They are mostly children ; and, as far as possible, I get what knowledge I can of their families both on the paternal and the maternal side. It happens in a very con- siderable proportion that the father and mother are the best of the families from