qualities unscrupulousness and acquisitiveness and a vulgar idea of achievement. Given a family of morally and intellectually superior types, all contented with simple conditions, and averse to commercial struggle, are they to be classed as ill-born, or failures? If, finally, it should be shown that a common condition of thriving for large or other families is the possession of capital for a start in business, we are brought to no conclusion in eugenics, but set asking for one in terms of politics.

3. It is, indeed, highly important to set up such common standards as shall preclude replication of morbid stocks, including in these those seen to tend to insanity, dumbness, suicide, dipsomania, erotism, violence, etc. Mr. Galton's past work has done much to bring the importance of heredity home to thinking people. But there is a danger of seeming to ask too much. For one thing, we must not overlook the fact that mere high physical stamina is not necessarily, or even very probably, a condition of high brain power. Merely "delicate" people, therefore, are not to be warned off marriage. Many great men (e. g., Newton and Voltaire) were extremely fragile in infancy. Some (e. g., Calvin, Pope, Spencer, Heine, Stevenson) were chronic invalids. For another thing, though it seems clear that high capacity in one parent is often neutralized by the lack of it in the other, it is vain to think to eliminate the factor of love or instinctive preference in marriage.

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4. It seems impossible, finally, to separate eugenics from politics, inasmuch as the bad physical and moral conditions set up by poverty-i. e., ill-feeding, ill-housing, ill-clothing, and early prolificacy on the one hand, and ignorance in child-rearing and begetting on the other are the great forces of "kakogenics." Mr. Galton says: 'There is strong reason for believing that the rise and decline of nations is closely connected with " the rate of reproduction in the “ upper or other classes. I respectfully suggest that an effect is here put for a cause. The true causation of the rise and decline of nations, surely, is proximately a general economic process, depending primarily on physical environment (that is, natural resources), and secondarily on political direction, which is conditioned by political environment. That is to say, Rome did not rise through the fecundity or fall through the infecundity of her ruling or other classes. In the early period they were normally fecund. In the period of empire they appear to have become infecund as a result of the bad relation to life set up by their imperialistic economics. But mere fecundity on their part would not have made that economics healthy, or rectified their relation to life. Saracen society has often presented fecund aristocracies, without any arrest of social decline. The depopulation of imperial Italy and of post-Alexandrian Greece, on the other hand, was not a physiological, but an economic, process. The Greeks went to the new and more facile economic conditions. For Rome, the import of grain as tribute from rich soils killed the competition of Italian soil, and slave labor was rather a result than a cause of the elimination of the old peasantry.

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Perhaps, indeed, Mr. Galton would not dissent from the general proposition that eugenics involves politics. But it seems to me that the necessary regression is obscured when it is suggested that eugenics is mainly a matter of the right adjustment of individual conduct, in a social system politically fixed. If this be meant, I submit that it is a form of the fallacy of prescribing a new heart" as the sufficient means to social regeneration. Nations can only very gradually change their hearts, and part of the process consists in changing their houses, their clothes, their alimentation, their economic position, and their institutions as a means to the rest.

BY W. BATESON, M.A., F.R.S.

With the objects of the paper everyone will sympathize, and there can be no doubt that this discussion will do something to promote the study of heredity and the introduction of scientific method in the breeding of man and other animals. An exact knowledge of the laws of inheritance will be a factor in the destiny of mankind, as large as, if not larger than, any yet brought to bear.

I notice that in the paper stress is laid on the "actuarial side of heredity,"

and on the application of statistical methods of a comprehensive character to the solution of the problems involved. Students of the subject are well aware what interesting results have been attained by those methods, especially in the hands of Mr. Galton himself work that did much to develop this branch of science at a time when it was almost abandoned by naturalists. It may, nevertheless, not be inopportune, on such an occasion, which may well prove to be a point of new departure, to recall the fact that, though these " actuarial methods were appropriate to an incipient stage of the inquiry, means of attacking the problem directly and with greater effect are now well developed.

In nearly every case to which the method of accurate experimental breeding has been applied, it has been possible to show that the phenomena of heredity follow precise laws of remarkable simplicity, which the grosser statistical methods had necessarily failed to reveal. Inquiries, therefore, pursued on those older lines are largely superfluous, and give ambiguous results, inasmuch as they serve to conceal an underlying physiological order which closer analysis would make readily evident. It is, therefore, doubtful whether the prodigious labor needed for the collection and reduction of comprehensive statistics as to the distribution of hereditary qualities is well spent, in view of the probability that the significance of the deductions drawn will disappear so soon as it becomes possible to apply a more stringent method of research.

The actuarial method will perhaps continue to possess a certain fascination in regions of the inquiry where experimental methods are at present inapplicable, but conclusions drawn from facts not capable of minute analysis can at best be regarded as interim conclusions, awaiting a test which, in all likelihood, they will not endure.

I would, therefore, urge that those who really have such aims at heart will best further eugenics by promoting the attainment of that solid and irrefragable knowledge of the physiology of heredity which experimental breeding can alone supply.

BY C. S. LOCH, B.A.

I. With regard to the study of eugenics, and the possibility of the idea which the word represents becoming operative in the lower section of society, an intelligent regard to social welfare, beyond what is now prevalent in any class, is the first condition. Is it possible to promote the objects of the writer of the paper, except indirectly, so far as that section is concerned? As they learn at public elementary schools, or in other ways, the conditions of healthy life, they may realize the necessity of what in a broad sense may be called good breeding.

2. To carry out the suggestions of Dr. Galton for the other higher sections of society may possibly be easier; but propagandism of a certain kind during the last ten or fifteen years has tended rather to promote a reduction in the number of children born, and that among a good class, than what one may call the better breeding of a larger number of children.

3. It may be agreed that a scientific statement on the subject would touch the imagination of a large number of our people, and that steps toward increasing our knowledge might be more widely adopted; but unless definite laws are discovered which can be practically turned into social commandments, and can be so stated and preached with a kind of religious fervor, it seems hardly possible to make very much further progress on such a question. Are we near the time at which such laws can be formulated in a manner that would meet with general acceptance on the part of all scientific students of the subject?

MR. GALTON.

When this debate began, I was extremely unhappy at the quality of it. The two first speakers really seemed to me to be living forty years ago; they displayed so little knowledge of what has been done since. More than one of the later speakers were really not acquainted with the facts, and they ought not to have spoken at all. We are much indebted to Professor Weldon for raising the debate to a higher level.

Mr. Wells spoke of "stirpiculture" as a term preferable to eugenics." I

myself inverted it, and deliberately changed it for " eugenics." Dr. Hutchison believes that environment is far more important than stock, but you know perfectly well how one baby, dog, horse, differs enormously from another by nature; and surely it is not denied that we should take pains to increase the multiplication of the best variants.

Mr. Elderton in his few remarks touched on an important point - that the insurance offices might give a great deal of information. I quite agree with him in that, and also on the correlation of certain diseases and fertility. I thought it was always said that consumptive mothers were prolific. I remember I went with very great pains into medical data to get certain results of that kind. I was appalled at the want of precision in getting up the facts. The facts brought forward by one group did not agree with those brought forward by another. I went to the Consumptive Hospital at Brompton, and found a total divergence of opinion as to what consumption was. I am speaking of twenty or thirty years back.

As to Mr. Kidd, I do not attach importance to his points. His drones would have selected the best drones, and each one would have selected the best of its kind and worked out their own civilization in their own way.

I have little more to say, except that I do feel that if the society is to do any good work in this direction, it must attack it in a much better way than the majority of speakers seem to have done tonight.

THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY.1

IX. PREMISES OF PRACTICAL SOCIOLOGY.'

SOCIOLOGY tries to bring into view, and to explain, all the sorts of facts that take place in men's lives, in such a way that they will tell the most about what to do, and how to do it, here and now.

In spite of something like chaos among the sociologists, so far as apparent consensus about abstract theory is concerned, the time is at hand for attempts to bring pure sociology to application. At least, it is safe and desirable to begin to mark out the procedure which will become more and more precise and profitable as sociology matures.

Sociology has passed through two stages since the beginning of the nineteenth century: (1) A stage of dilettantism, both in theory and in practice. This stage was prolific of fanciful social philosophies and of utopian schemes of social improvement. (2) A stage of criticism. It is impossible to draw precise boundaries between these stages. Indeed, the two phases of development have overlapped in the same persons. When Herbert Spencer wrote his Social Statics, in 1850, he was dominated by the former 1 Chapters i-iii of this series appeared in this JOURNAL, Vol. V, Nos. 4-6 inclusive; chapters iv-vii, in Vol. VI, Nos. 1-4; and chapter viii, in Vol. VIII, No. 2. The chapters are not consecutive, but they are studies to be recast in a syllabus of general sociology.

"social

2 My colleague, Professor C. R. Henderson, has adopted the phrase technology." It means the whole body of approved devices for promoting social progress in every department of life. It is a proper designation of the modern type of effort for social improvement, all of which bears the same relation to fundamental sociology that all physical technology bears to the underlying physical sciences. In the title of this paper I have refrained from using the phrase, first, because I want to avoid the appearance of venturing into the field where Dr. Henderson is an expert, and I a layman; second, because the present discussion is from the point of view of the general sociologist, not of the social technologist. That is, the paper tries to show how abstract sociology converges upon analysis of concrete conditions. From the technological side the backsight upon general sociology might show a different perspective. The important matter is that general sociology and social technology are correlates. Each helps to legitimize the other.

impulse. Although he never entirely shook off the traditions of that stage of thinking, he was of course eminent in promoting critical study of society.

It would be a task for the historian of sociology to assign due credit for the later attitude of the sociologists. We need not stop for that. The point is that, under the influence of the critical spirit, the reaction against sociological sentimentalism has well-nigh paralyzed the progressive and constructive impulses which did credit to the zeal, if not the discretion, of the older doctrinaires and agitators. The latter felt a "woe is me" if they "if did not act for the immediate benefit of society. The later critical sociologists successfully discouraged the active impulse. In some cases it is hard to believe that the impulse existed. They held that we must know the facts about society before we can reconstruct society by artificial means. They have accordingly been working without much organization, but with a division of labor which has pretty closely covered the ground, in spite of the fact that the co-operation was accidental and unconscious. Taking the results of all the critical sociologists together, we have preliminary surveys of all the activities of society. These are sufficient guides to justify resumption of attempts to look ahead. That is, we have not reached any conclusions which have much value as premises for social dogmas, but we have some pretty distinct outline maps of social activities in all their stages and variations. We have no formulas that are worth anything for quantitative measurement of social influences past, present, or future; but we have such means of qualitative social analysis that we may feel fairly well acquainted with society in principle, while we lack knowledge of less general details.

This abstract and general knowledge, moreover, is at our disposal for practical work. If it is valid science, it forms a secure basis, so far as it goes, for progress such as the early sentimentalists desired. If our present sociological knowledge is of a kind capable of supporting more practical activities, there is also enough of it to give those activities strong impulse.

In other words, the sociologists have served a sufficiently long apprenticeship in pure science, or in attempts to perfect the