Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/136

132 worse, memory than the average; the child superior in observation is superior in inference; scholarship is prophetic of success out of school; a good mind means a better than average character. The fifty greatest warriors of the world will be above the average man as poets. The fifty greatest artists of the world will be better scientists than the average. Genius of a certain type does, via the nervous temperament, ally itself to eccentricities of a certain type; and very stupid men can not be rated as insane because they are already idiots; but on the average the most

 After Woods.

intellectual tenth of the population would, under equal conditions of strain, furnish fewer lapses into insanity than its proportional quotum.

Selective breeding for superior intellect and character does not then require great skill to avoid injurious by-products or correlatives of intrinsically good traits. Intrinsically good traits have also good correlatives. Any method of selective breeding, then, which increases the productivity of intellectually or morally good stock over that of poor stock, will improve man, with one possible added requirement—that breeding should be for fertility as well, should not be suicidal, should not make the race better, but at the same time put an end to it altogether!

It might be that there was a necessary inverse correlation in human nature between fecundity and high intellectual and moral station whereby, the better men became, the fewer offspring they would have; and whereby, at a certain limit of super-manhood, reproduction would cease. Certain changes of the birth-rate with time, and certain