Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 4.pdf/341

 that heart, will swiftly disorganise the entire fabric and burst its way to a hæmorrhage in lung perhaps, or brain, or wherever the slightest relative weakening permits. The "perfect" health of a negro may be a quite dissimilar system of reactions to the "perfect" health of a vigorous white; you may blend them only to create an ailing mass of physiological discords. "Health," just as much as these other things, is, for this purpose of marriage diplomas and the like, a vague, unserviceable synthetic quality. It serves each one of us for our private and conversational needs, but in this question it is not hard enough and sharp enough for the thing we want it to do. Brought to the service of this fine and complicated issue it breaks down altogether. We do not know enough. We have not analysed enough nor penetrated enough. There is no science yet, worthy of the name, in any of these things.

These considerations should at least suffice to demonstrate the entire impracticability of Mr. Galton's two suggestions. Moreover, this idea of picking out high-scale individuals in any particular quality or group of qualities and breeding them, is not the way of Nature at all. Nature is not a breeder; she is a reckless coupler and—she slays. It was a popular misconception of the theory of the Survival of the Fittest, a misconception Lord Salisbury was at great pains to display to the British Association in 1894, that the average of a species in any respect is raised by the selective inter-breeding of the individuals above the average. Lord Salisbury was no doubt misled, as most people who share his mistake have