Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/337

Rh environmental differences which are experienced by children in the public schools of New York are not very great and that the traits concerned are not really important ones. Such important traits as normal healthy body and mind for a long life of valuable achievement, and a clean bill of character, can only be determined as present or absent, in their varying amounts, after the race of life has been completely or nearly run, and the records of success or failure, of distinction or obscurity, of vices or virtues, have been left behind. The boy is father to the man but our knowledge of biometry already teaches us that this does not mean identity; it merely means a correlation.

The study of children may lead us to wrong conclusions for other reasons. It has already been shown in this article that, other things equal, the young can be more easily affected by surroundings than the adult, and also that there is a great tendency for the higher organisms to equalize in time what they have gained or lost in youth, and to grow after a predetermined plan. For these reasons even the discovery of actual modifications produced among children would not show that the grown men and women, who will be freer to pick and choose their congenial environment, will not follow the same paths that they otherwise would have done.

Pearson and his pupils have recently attempted, by the comparative study of children, to differentiate between the relative influence of heredity and environment. Their results are confirmatory for the special traits studied. In a memoir on vision and sight the authors write as follows, with regard to the effects of environment.

At the close of the paper the authors make the surprising statement that their own research is "the first eugenic study which has endeavored to compare the inheritance and environment factors. We anticipated finding them to be far more comparable in magnitude." If the authors had read a little of the earlier researches on the question of the relative influence of heredity and environment they would neither have spoken of their own eugenic study as the first nor have expressed wonderment at the result.

In "The Relative Strength of Nurture and Nature," Ethel M. Elderton analyzes the above investigation on the eye-sight of children, and also her own study on "The Influence of Parental Occupation and