Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/363

expect all who surmounted them to be prodigies of genius. The hindrances would form a system of natural selection, by repressing all whose gifts were below a certain very high level. . . . The hindrances undoubtedly form a system of natural selection that represses mediocre men, and even men of fair powers. . . . If a man is gifted with vast intellectual ability, eagerness to work, and power of working, I can not comprehend how such a man should be repressed. (Hered. Gen., p. 38, etc.)

Eugenics.—No more fundamental and commanding factor of modern biology is current than that of heredity. This has been long understood in its applications to various details of husbandry. Only of late has it become fairly subject to control and direction, Nearly ten years ago in an address before the Association of Academic Principals I gave expression to its educational implications in the following words:

Of all the equipments which go to fit pupils for the larger life before them none is more fundamental and imperative than that most vital of all biological factors—generation and heredity. If the highest level of human vigor and perfection is ever to be realized it must be by critical regard for, not defiance of, those simple and fundamental laws of biology which underlie heredity in generation. How long shall we continue to look with admiration and pride upon the rich fruition of an intelligent application of these laws to the endlessly varied products of field and stable, and at the same time pretend to bewail the endless lines of human degeneracy, pauperism and imbecility? Just so long as we ignore or defy the potency of these same laws in human generation!

It was in the light of just this truth that Dr. Holmes in answer to the query "when should a child's education begin," replied, "one hundred years before it is born"! And in a somewhat facetious paraphrase of the idea a later writer has said, "In the light of science it is up to children to be extremely cautious in selecting their grandparents." Waiving all the apparent paradox of the one, or the cynicism of the other, the present message of biology to every sane and serious man or woman in relation to progeny would be similar—due attention to selection of children. If the Roman adage, "a sound mind in a sound body," has any significance for education to-day it is just in the above sense. It is strangely significant that Plato conceived a similar ideal as the basis of his Republic; and had he known as do we to-day the directing and controlling power of heredity, that Republic, instead of an Utopia, might have been an abiding reality, as glorious as the imperishable art and literature of its golden age!

Let it not be insinuated that eugenics as a program is as utopian as Plato's unless forsooth one turn skeptic concerning all laws of life. In the language of a recent authority

We may enunciate as a law of social evolution that a race possessing social culture will be victorious in the struggle for existence over a race devoid of social culture, the physical strength of either being equal. But it would be a grievous error to suppose that social culture by itself is any guaranty of stability. Athens had social culture unequalled by any of its rivals; but Athens fell. Social culture without biological fitness is as useless as biological fitness without