the more generous impulses. The unreasoned philanthropy of an earlier time might do harm by indiscriminate giving; when it finds rational channels for its activity it will prompt a man to throw in his weight with the best civic movements of the day. Nor, again, is the effect of social institutions to be measured by modifications in the qualities of individuals as that expression would be generally understood. Take, for example, the effect of education. It is certainly desirable that education should develop the intelligence, but how much net addition is made to intellectual capacity by educational processes is exceedingly difficult to measure. Acquired knowledge or skill, on the other hand, are tangible achievements in which the response of the individual on the one side and the teaching provided on the other are two inseparable conditions. It is acquirement or achievement, e.g. knowledge, skill, discipline, that training confers, and the modifications thus effected in a man's life and his functions as a member of society are so great as to amount in many cases to a change of kind rather than of degree. The distinction is ignored by certain writers of the eugenic school, who seek to depreciate the effect of nurture as compared with nature, even in its bearing on the individual. But apart from this some of the methods used to measure the effect of the environment are of very doubtful value. Thus, in the lecture already quoted, Miss Elderton seeks to measure the effect of the environment by utilizing the Report of the Charity Organization Society on certain school children in Edinburgh. The home environment of the children is considered under the following heads :

The number of people per room;
Good economic conditions;

Good physical condition of parents;
Good moral condition of parents.

With regard to the last point, Miss Elderton admits there is room for variation of judgment, and one would say that even the three former would require very close investigation in order to form an accurate classification. However, having made this classification, Miss Elderton proceeds to take the reports on certain qualities of the children, on their vision, hearing, glandular condition, and intelligence; on some of these points I confess I should not expect the environment to produce any very marked effect, but the question of intelligence is interesting from our point of view, and here Miss Elderton is able to produce results indicating in her opinion a very small, if not a negligible, effect. Good economic conditions alone show a small influence upon the intelligence alike of boys and girls.1 On these figures it must be remarked that they include

The negative signs indicate that the better conditions are associated with lower intelligence. The insignificance of the figures is to be measured by the fact that the general figure of correlation for heredity is taken by the writer to be about .49 in the case of intelligence.

several doubtful and even unknown quantities. How is the intelligence of boys and girls measured? On this vital point we have no information. At best it represents some impression of somebody, presumably of teachers, and what sort of standard is applied by which the fractions are determined we are not told. But if we take the figures at their face value, we find an exceedingly paradoxical result. It is constantly assumed that better economic and social conditions are generally indicative of superiority of stock. In that case the parents conforming to the better conditions are, it is to be inferred, men and women of better stock; and according to this, apart altogether from environmental influences, we should expect their children to show better results. We should expect the full correlation worked out for us in other cases of heredity. How is it that this fails when the present test is applied? We seem driven to the conclusion either that this particular method of calculation is misleading or that the general assumption upon which many of the sociological arguments of Eugenists are based, that the socially more fortunate classes are of the best hereditary strain, is unfounded. It must be added that when the home conditions are used as a test of the general effect of the environment, some very serious omissions are made. It appears to be forgotten that in a great measure the environment of all the children attending the same school, or even schools of the same class in a single town, is identical, particularly as regards the effect on intelligence. The school teaching is identical for all, and beyond that, all the children are born in the same area, in the same

town, under the same law, and have to conform to the same standard of civilization; they learn the same things and are accessible to the same ideas. We get nothing but a fractional measure of the environment when we merely differentiate home surroundings.

Lastly, it will be seen that the writer does not even take in home surroundings as a whole. She divides them into heads and under each head finds a correlation which is very small compared with that of physical heredity. Now, if the comparison were to denote anything at all, it must begin by attempting to set the whole of the environmental conditions on the one side against the whole of hereditary conditions on the other. To take one environmental condition among many and to compare its effect with the total effect of physical heredity is a method of argument which can throw no light on the question at issue, and to take several environmental conditions in series without attempting to sum their effect is to produce an illusion of proof without reality.

An illustration equally remarkable in its own way of the mental processes by which some eugenic writers arrive at conclusions which go out to the public as the ordinances of the scientific world may be found in another publication of the same laboratory on "The Inheritance of Vision." The writers, Miss Amy Barrington and Professor Pearson, in summarizing their conclusion begin by remarking that it is "admittedly only a first study." "No one can recognize its defects more fully than the authors themselves do." With this becomnig modesty they go on to speak of the difficulties of obtaining evidence and then remark that as far as "the ad

mittedly slender data of this first study" allow certain specific conclusions may be formulated which they then state in a manner to which no objection can be taken. Having stated them, they proceed to speak in more general terms.

As far as the material developed in this memoir goes, it points, if not overwhelmingly, at least strongly, to the moral: Pay attention to breeding, and the environmental element will not affect your projects. Improve to the utmost your environment, breeding will lay low your schemes.

"The first thing is good stock, and the second thing is good stock, and the third thing is good stock, and when you have paid attention to these three things, fit environment will keep your material in good condition. No environmental or educational grindstone is of service, unless the tool to be ground is of genuine steel of tough race and tempered stock.

To bring home this fact in each department of human physique and mentality seems to be the urgent social problem of to-day."

This is a somewhat rapid transition from the cautious and scientific to the dogmatizing mood. The conclusions from "admittedly slender data" are first made to suggest a general conclusion which goes far beyond the particular case investigated. In the next paragraph the conclusion is dogmatically asserted without the least reference to the slenderness of the evidence, and in the third it has become the basis of practical statesmanship and to drive it home the most urgent social problem of the day. And this goes forth to the world as the decisive word of true science with its caution, its detachment, its objectivity, its reasonableness.

We may lay down with some confidence, first, that, as to the relative effect of nature and nurture upon the