if I am not merely repeating the vague words of the old sociologists, from Comte to Herbert Spencer? Where is the material, what, are the methods, how definite are the deductions of this new science of eugenics?
First then: where is the material?
I reply that every large school and university in this country can provide physical and psychical material for the student of eugenics if he will set to work and observe. Every medical officer in asylum and hospital is in charge of a great eugenics laboratory if he would only realize it. And many indeed are realizing it. Quite recently between 300 and 400 pedigrees of tuberculous stock; 400 family histories of insanity; 400 descriptions of parentage and home environment of mentally defective children, with as many of normal children from one district, and upwards of 1,000 from a second district, have reached the Eugenics Laboratory in London. If this seems to lay all stress on the abnormal and defective side, I may add that the laboratory possesses records of nearly 400 noteworthy families—a part of which have been published—and that I have reached now a series of nearly 300 normal family histories, many of them containing 50 to 100 individuals, with psychical and physical descriptions and entries as to ailments and causes of death. These are but, of course, the beginnings of a collection which one hopes and trusts will one day represent large samples of the physique, the mentality, the fertility and the disease of wide classes of the nation. The success of this sort of eugenics laboratory collection depends upon spreading widely three convictions: (1) that really useful results have flown, and will flow, from contributing to it; (2) that individuals, if appealed to frankly, will frankly tell the truth that lies within their knowledge; and (3) that the individual becomes a non-identifiable statistical unit before the record passes into the hands of the computer.[1]
Beyond the special collections of an individual laboratory there is already available a fair amount of published material. The United States has issued special censuses of the blind and of deaf-mutes. The Edinburgh Charity Organization Society has issued an excellent memoir on the home environment and the physique of 700 to 800 school children; above all, there are the registrar general's annual reports, the censuses, the reports of fever hospitals, of lunacy commissioners, and of the medical officers of asylums. Of some, but less value, are the reports of government commissions and the works of energetic, but statistically untrained, philanthropists like Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree. Important special researches, like that of Mr. Tocher on the insane of Scotland, or that now being carried out by Dr. Goring on
- ↑ The Eugenics Laboratory will gladly forward schedules (1) for general family history or (2) for special family abnormalities to any one interested in eugenic inquiry and willing to aid.
