alone in the study of individual faculty often carry us to very incomplete conclusions, if not corrected by larger and more scientific conceptions of the social good. I remember our chairman, in his earlier social essays, once depicted an ideally perfect state of society. I have a distinct recollection of my own sense of relief that my birth had occurred in the earlier ages of comparative barbarism. For Mr. Pearson, I think, proposed to give the kind of people who now scribble on our railway carriages no more than a short shrift and the nearest lamp-post. I hope we shall not seriously carry this spirit into eugenics. It might renew, in the name of science, tyrannies that it took long ages of social evolution to emerge from. Judging from what one sometimes reads, many of our ardent reformers would often be willing to put us into lethal chambers, if our minds and bodies did not conform to certain standards. We are apt to forget in these matters that that sense of responsibility to life which distinguishes the higher societies is itself an asset painfully acquired by the race-a social asset of such importance that the more immediate gain aimed at would count by the side of it as no more than dust in the balance. Our methods of knowledge are as yet admittedly very imperfect. Mr. Galton himself, I remember, as the result of his earlier researches into human faculty, put the intellectual caliber of what are called the lower races many degrees below that of the European races. I ventured to point out some years ago that this assumption appeared to be premature, and the data upon which it was founded insufficient. So much is now generally admitted. Yet it would have been awkward had we proceeded to draw any large practical conclusion from it at the time. The deficiency of what have been called the lower races is now seen to be, not so much an intellectual deficiency, as a deficiency in social qualities and social history, and therefore in social inheritance.

Many examples of a similar kind might be given. It may be remembered, for instance, how a generation or two ago Malthusianism was urged upon us in the name of science and almost with the zeal of a religion. We have lived to see the opposite view now beginning to be urged with much the same zeal and emphasis. A nation or a race cannot afford to make practical mistakes on a large scale in these matters.

I trust and believe that much that Mr. Galton anticipates will be realized. But I think we must go slowly with our science of eugenics, and that we must take care, above all things, that it advances with, and does not precede, a real science of our social evolution. We must come to the work in a humble spirit. Even the highest representatives of the various social sciences must realize that in the specialized study of sociology as a whole they are scarcely more than distinguished amateurs. Otherwise, in few other departments of study would there be so much danger of incomplete knowledge, and even of downright quackery, clothing itself with the mantle and authority of science.

BY MRS. DR. DRYSDALE VICKERY.

The speech which has interested me most is that of Dr. Hutchison. Important as is the quality of hereditary stock, yet at the present juncture I would say that of still greater importance is this, that we have such a vast number of our population growing up under bad conditions. The result is an artificial, a merely economic, multiplication of inferior stocks. The question I wish to raise is this: Are we producing, in this country and in all civilized countries, a greater proportion of new individuals than can be favorably absorbed? In a country like Russia the surplus of births over deaths amounts to two millions in the year; in Germany the surplus is a million; in Britain, not quite half a million. Can we, in an old state of society, absorb that amount of new individuals and give them fair conditions of existence? I think not.

Dr. Warner spoke of the importance of our teaching of girls. I hold very strongly that the question of heredity, as we study it at present, is very much a question of masculine heredity only, and that heredity with feminine aspects is very much left out of account. Mr. Galton told us that a certain number of burgesses' names had absolutely disappeared; but what about the names of their wives, and how would that consideration affect his conclusion? In the future, the question of population will, I hope, be considered very much from the

feminine point of view; and if we wish to produce a well-developed race, we must treat our womankind a little better than we do at present. We must give them something more like the natural position which they should hold in society. Women's specialized powers must be utilized for the intellectual advancement of the race.

BY LADY WELBY.

The science of eugenics as not only dealing with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race," but also "with those that develop them to the utmost advantage," must have the most pressing interest for women. And one of the first things to do pending regulative reform is to prepare the minds of women to take a truer view of their dominant natural impulse toward service and self-sacrifice. They need to realize more clearly the significance of their mission to conceive, to develop, to cherish, and to train-in short, in all senses to mother the next and through that the succeeding generations of man.

As things are they have almost entirely missed the very point both of their special function and of their strongest yearnings. They have lost that discerning guidance of eugenic instinct and that inerrancy of eugenic preference which, broadly speaking, in both sexes have given us the highest types of man yet developed. The refined and educated woman of this day is brought up to countenance, and to see moral and reiigious authority countenance, social standards which practically take no account of the destinies and the welfare of the race. It is thus hardly wonderful that she should be failing more and more to fulfil her true mission, should indeed too often be unfaithful to it, spending her instinct of devotion in unworthy, or at least barren, directions. Yet, once she realizes what the results will be that she can help to bring about, she will be even more ready than the man to give herself, not for that vague empty abstraction, the future," but for the coming generations among which her own descendants may be reckoned. For her natural devotion to her babe- - the representative of the generations yet to come - is even more complete than that of her husband, which indeed is biologically, though she knows it not, her recognition in him of the means to a supreme end.

But it is not only thus that women are concerned with the profound obligation to the race which the founder of the science of eugenics is bringing home to the social conscience. At present, anyhow, a large proportion of civilized women find themselves from one or another cause debarred from this social service in the direct sense.

There is another kind of race-motherhood open to, and calling for the intelligent recognition and intelligent fulfilment by, all women. There are kinds of natural and instinctive knowledge of the highest value which the artificial social conditions of civilization tend to efface. There are powers of swift insight and penetration - which powers also of unerring judgmentare actually atrophied by the ease and safety secured in highly organized communities. These, indeed, are often found in humble forms, which might be called in-sense and fore-sense.

While I would lay stress on the common heritage of humanity which gives the man a certain motherhood and the woman a certain fatherhood in outlook, perhaps also in intellectual function, we are here mainly concerned with the specialized mental activities of women as distinguished from those of men. It has long been a commonplace that women have, as a rule, a larger share of so-called intuition" than men. But the reasons for this, its true nature and its true work and worth, have never, so far as I know, been brought forward. It is obvious that these reasons cannot be properly dealt with indeed, can but barely be indicated in these few words. They involve a reference to all the facts which anthropology, archæology, history, psychology, and physiology, as well as philology, have so far brought to our knowledge. They mean a review of these facts in a new light that which, in many cases, the woman who has preserved or recovered her earlier, more primitive racial prerogative can alone throw upon them.

I will only here mention such facts as the part primitively borne by women

"

in the evolution of crafts and arts, including the important one of healing; and point out the absolute necessity, since an original parity of muscular development in the animal world was lost, of their meeting physical coercion by the help of keen, penetrative, resourceful wits, and the conning which (from the temptation of weakness to serve by deception) became what we now mean by "cunning." To these I think we may add the woman's leading part in the evolution of language. While her husband was the man of action," and in the heat of the chase and of battle, or the labor of building huts, making stockades, weapons, etc., the man of few words," she was necessarily the talker, necessarily the provider or suggester of symbolic sounds, and with them of pictorial signs, by which to describe the ever-growing products of human energy, intelligence, and constructiveness, and the ever-growing needs and interests of the race; in short, the everwidening range of social experience.

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We are all, men and women, apt to be satisfied now—as we have just been told, for instance, in the Faraday Lecture with things as they are. But that is just what we all came into the world to be dissatisfied with. And while it may now be said that women are more conservative than men, they still tend to be more adaptive. If the fear of losing by violent change what has been gained for the children were removed, women would be found, as of old, in the van of all social advance.

Lastly I would ask attention to the fact that throughout history, and I believe in every part of the world, we find the elderly woman credited with wisdom and acting as the trusted adviser of the man. It is only in very recent times and in highly artificial societies that we have begun to describe the dense, even the imbecile, man as an old woman." Here we have a notable evidence indeed of the disastrous atrophy of the intellectual heritage of woman, of the partial paralysis of that racial motherhood out of which she naturally speaks! Of course, as in all such cases, the inherited wisdom became associated with magic and wonder-working and sybilline gifts of all kinds. The always shrewd and often really originative, predictive, and wide-reaching qualities of the woman's mind (especially after the climacteric had been passed) were mistaken for the uncanny and devil-derived powers of the sorceress and the witch. Like the thinker, the moralist, and the healer, she was tempted to have recourse to the short-cut of the "black arts," and appeal to the supernatural and miraculous, as science would now define these. We still see, alas, that the special insight and intelligence of women tends to spend itself at best on such absurd misrepresentations of her own instincts and powers as "Christian Science; or worse, on clairvoyance and fortune-telling and the like. Then, it may be, elaborate theories of personality— mostly wide of the mark, and constructed upon phenomena which we could learn to analyze and interpret on strictly scientific and really philosophical principles, and thus to utilize at every point. We are, in short, failing to enlist for true social service a natural reserve of intelligence which mostly lying unrecognized and unused in any healthy form, forces its way out in morbid ones. And let us here remember that we are not merely considering a question of sex. No mental function is entirely unrepresented on either side.

The question then arises: How is civilized man to avail himself fully of this reserve of power? The provisional answer seems to be: By making the most of it through the training of all girls for the resumption of a lost power of racemotherhood which shall make for their own happiness and well-being, in using these for the benefit of humanity; in short, by making the most of it through truer methods in education than any which have yet, except in rare cases, been applied. Certainly until we do this many social problems of the highest importance will needlessly continue to baffle and defeat us.

BY MR. HOBHOUSE.

I feel a good deal of difficulty in intervening in this extremely interesting discussion at this stage. I, like many of you, am only a listener to what the biologists have to tell us in this matter. Until we have very definite information as to what heredity can do, I think those of us who are only students of

sociology, and who cannot lay any claim whatever to be biologists, ought to keep silence. We have this afternoon had extremely divergent views put before us as to the actual and probable operation of heredity, and it seems quite clear that before we begin to tackle this question, which deals with one of the most powerful of human passions, with a view to regulate it, we must have highly perfected knowledge. We must have the chart properly mapped out before we do anything that might lead us into greater danger than we at present incur.

As to the two factors, stock and environment, no one. can doubt that both are of fundamental importance in relation to the welfare of society; and no one can doubt that, if the kind of precise knowledge which I desiderate could be laid before us by the biologist, it would have considerable influence on our views of what is not only ethically right, but what could be legislatively enforced. Of these two factors, stock and environment, which can we modify with the greater ease and certainty of not doing harm? It is fairly obvious that we can affect the environment of mankind in certain definite ways. We have the accumulation of considerable tradition as to the way a given act will affect the social environment. When we come to bring stock into consideration, we are still dealing with that which is very largely unknown. At the same time, we owe a great deal of thanks

to Mr. Galton for raising this subject. On the one hand, it seems to me that the bare conception of a conscious selection as a way in which educated society would deal with stock is infinitely higher than natural selection with which biologists have confronted every proposal of sociology. If we are to take the problem of stock into consideration at all, it ought to be in the way of intelligently handling the blind forces of nature. But until we have far more knowledge and agreement as to criteria of conscious selection, I fear we cannot, as sociologists, expect to do much for our society on these lines.

BY G. A. ARCHDALL REID, M.D.

I think it would be impossible to imagine a subject of greater importance, or to name one of which the public is more ignorant. At the root of every moral and social question lies the problem of heredity. Until a knowledge of the laws of heredity is more widely diffused, the public will grope in the dark in its endeavors to solve many pressing difficulties.

How shall we bring about a "wide dissemination of a knowledge of the laws of heredity, so far as they are surely known, and the promotion of their further study"? We shall not be able to reach the public until we are able to influence the education of a body of men whose studies naturally bring them into relation with the subject, and who, when united, are numerous enough and powerful enough to sway public opinion. Only one such body of men exists — the medical profession. When the study of heredity forms as regular a part of the medical curriculum as anatomy and physiology, then, and not till then, will the laws of heredity be brought to bear on the solution of social problems. At present a specialist like Mr. Galton has a very limited audience. In effect, it is composed of specialists like himself. Until among medical men a systematic knowledge of heredity is substituted for a bundle of prejudices, and close and clear reasoning for wild guesswork, the influence of men of Mr. Galton's type most unhappily is not likely to extend much beyond the limits of a few learned societies.

The first essential is a clear grasp of the distinction which exists between what are known as inborn traits and what are known as acquired traits. Inborn traits are those with which the individual is "born," which come to him by nature, which form his natural inheritance from his parents. Acquired traits are alterations produced in inborn traits by influences to which they are exposed during the life of the individual. Thus a man's limbs are inborn traits, but the changes produced in his limbs by exercise, injury, and so forth are acquired traits. All men know that the individual tends to transmit his inborn traits to his offspring. But it is now almost universally denied by students of heredity that he tends to transmit his acquired traits. The real, the burning question among students of heredity is whether changes in an individual caused by the

action of the environment on him tend in any way to affect the offspring subsequently born to him. Thus, for example, does good health in an individual tend to benefit his offspring? Does his ill-health tend to enfeeble them?

It is generally assumed that changes in the parents do tend to influence the inborn traits of offspring. Thus we have heard much of the degeneracy which it is alleged is befalling our race owing to the bad hygienic conditions under which it dwells in our great growing cities. The assumption is made that the race is being so injured by the bad conditions that the descendant of a line of slumdwellers, if removed during infancy to the country, would, on the average, be inferior physically to the descendant of a line of rustics; whereas, contrariwise, the descendant of a line of rustics, if removed during infancy to the slums would be superior physically to the majority of the children he would meet there.

I believe this assumption to be a totally unwarrantable one. It is founded on a confusion between inborn and acquired traits. Of course, the influences which act on a slum-bred child tend to injure him personally. But there is no certain evidence that the descendant of a line of slum-dwellers is on the average inferior to the descendant of a line of rustics whose parents migrated to the slums just after his birth. I believe in fact, that while a life in the slums deteriorates the individual, it does not affect directly the hereditary tendencies of the race in the least. A vast mass of evidence may be adduced in support of this contention. Slums are not a creation of yesterday. They have existed in many countries from very ancient times. Races that have been most exposed

to slum life canot be shown to be inferior physically and mentally to those that have been less or not at all exposed. The Chinese, for example, who have been more exposed, and for a longer time, to such influences than any other people, are physically and mentally a very fine race, and certainly not inferior to the Dyacks of Borneo, for example.

There is also a mass of collateral evidence. Thus Africans and other races have been literally soaked in the extremely virulent and abundant poison of malaria for thousands of years. We know how greatly malaria damages the individual. But Africans have not deteriorated. Like the Chinese, physically, at any rate, they are a very fine race. Practically speaking, every negro child suffers from malaria, and may perish of it. But while the sufferings of the negroes from malaria have produced no effect on the race, the deaths of negroes from malaria have produced an immense effect. The continual weeding out, during many generations, of the unfittest has rendered the race pre-eminently resistant to malaria; so that negroes can now flourish in countries which we, who have suffered very little from malaria, find it impossible to colonize. Similarly, the inhabitants of northern Europe have suffered greatly for thousands of years from consumption, especially in places where the population has been densewhere there have been many cities and towns, and therefore slums. They also have not deteriorated; they have merely grown pre-eminently strong against consumption. They are able to live, for example, in English cities, in which consumption is very rife, and which individuals of races which have been less exposed to the disease find as dangerous as Englishmen find the west coast of Africa.

During the last four hundred years consumption has spread very widely, and now no race is able to dwell in cities and towns, especially in cold and temperate climates, that has not undergone evolution against it. In other words, no race is capable of civilization that has not undergone evolution against consumption, as well as against other diseases and influences, deteriorating to the individual, which civilization brings in its train. Many biologists and most medical men believe that influences acting on parents tend directly to alter the hereditary tendencies of of spring. In technical terms, they believe that variations are caused by action of the environment. How they contrive to do so in the face of the massive and conclusive evidence afforded by the natural history of human races in relation to disease is beyond my comprehension. How could a race undergo evolution against malaria (for example), if parental disease altered and injured the hereditary tendencies of the offspring. How could natural selection select, if all the variations presented for selection were unfavorable. The observations on