gress in London, 1912, of which, by the way, the next meeting is to be held in New York City, September, 1915. The English Eugenics Education Society has branches in New Zealand. In Germany, Dr. Ploetz has organised an Internationalle Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene of which the Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschafts-Biologie is the organ. In France a national society was organised a year ago; in Hungary one was established last spring.

Of institutions, there is the Francis Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics at London, directed by Professor Karl Pearson; it issues a Treasury of Human Inheritance and other publications. In America, Alexander Graham Bell founded, about 1888, the Volta Bureau which has fulfilled the function of a clearing house for family data relating to the deaf. In October, 1910, there was started at Cold Spring Harbor, N. Y., the Eugenics Record Office, made possible by the interest and the gifts of Mrs. E. H. Harriman. This office trains field workers who study, for state (and other) institutions, the family histories of the inmates. It has also a staff employed on special investigations. It preserves and indexes family records thus secured and also the "Records of Family Traits" and scattered data supplied by numerous volunteers. Its publications consist of a Bulletin series (11 numbers) and Memoirs in quarto (two numbers already issued). Besides Mrs. Harriman, the work has been supported by Mr. John D. Rockefeller and others. Its scientific work is directed by a board consisting of Alexander Graham. Bell, chairman; William H. Welch, vice-chairman; Lewellys F. Barker, Irving Fisher, E. E. Southard and

C. B. Davenport, secretary. The superintendent is H. H. Laughlin.1

Of books on eugenics and human heredity many have been written by Galton, Saleeby, Ellis and the Whethams in England; by Jordan, Kellicott, Woods and others in America. Of books on heredity (including eugenics) may be mentioned those of Bateson, Castle, Punnett and Walter.

Studies in eugenics soon reveal the importance of race" and, as stated above, lead to the conclusion that any population is a hybrid mixture of numerous incipient races. There are not many pure races. Even Africa has been penetrated through and through by Arabs and other non-black peoples. Even the American Indians were not a homogeneous people. Now these different species have different mental and physical characteristics and in so far as they have entered into the blood of any country (as they have into the blood of the United States) they complicate the topic of eugenics a subject which is concerned so largely with hereditary traits.

Eugenics has also relations with families and the study of genealogy. For as there are racial characteristics so there are also family characteristics, and these are maintained, despite widespread hybridisation, by two processes; first by consanguineous marriages which are commonest in islands, mountain valleys, rural com

1 Since this lecture was delivered Mrs. Huntington Wilson has provided for educational extension work in connection with the Eugenics Record Office, and the services of A. E. Hamilton, M.A., have been secured for this purpose. Lectures on eugenics will be given before such clubs, societies, churches and educational institutions as may request them.

munities and places with a minimum of intermigrations, and second by homogamy, or "like marrying like," which holds everywhere. The consequences of the latter process are to create families of statesmen (Harrison), of financiers (Morgan of Connecticut), of scholars (Edwards-Dwight), of inventors (Wilkinson), of soldiers (Lee of Virginia), of naval men (Hull-Foote), of actors (Jefferson). Such may be called aristogenic. On the other hand there are produced families of the feeble-minded, of the criminalistic, of deaf-mutes, of the tubercular. Such families may be called cacogenic. Cacogenic families are illustrated by the Jukes, the Ishmaelites, the Nams, the Hill Folks, and the Kallikaks. These examples of aristogenic and cacogenic families are evidence of a real social stratification in our population. Despite our boasted ideal of social equality, the unconscious factors of marriage selection, stronger than paper theories, have brought about the persistence of many family characteristics.

Eugenics rests on heredity, for permanent social improvement depends on the acquisition by the race of good. hereditary traits. The great advance that eugenics is making to-day depends largely on improved methods of studying heredity which give results that are more utilisable than by the old methods. By these methods our knowledge of heredity in plants and animals has enormously increased; new laws, new points of view have been gained and new methods of analysing data have been acquired. As a result of these studies we know that iris-pigment, dark hair-pigment, curly hair, dark skin colour, normal mental development, normal mental "stamina," normal resistance to epileptic convul

sions are all positive traits. When absent from both parents their absence is to be expected in all children. When present in either parent their presence is to be expected in at least half the children. Other traits which are more or less probably inherited as positive characters are short stature, slenderness, inability to express oneself adequately in music, painting, literature and mechanics.

Among diseases the normal condition seems probably to be the positive (dominant) condition in the following: hereditary ataxia, astigmatism, otosclerosis, Thomsen's disease, alkaptonuria, and, possibly, in nonresistance to consumption.

In other diseases the abnormal condition seems to be the positive (dominant) condition. This is true with more or less probability in Huntington's chorea, coloboma, or imperfect closure of the iris (?), microphthalmia, cataract, displaced lens, corneal opacity, ptosis and other imperfections of the muscles of the eyeball and lid (?), retinitis pigmentosa, night-blindness, epidermolysis bullosa (?), tylosis (or skin thickening), monilothrix (or beading of the hair) spottedness of hair coat, epistaxis or nosebleed (?), teleangiectasis, diabetes insipidus, hypospadias (males only), achondroplasia, or imperfect development of the skeleton, syndactylism, polydactylism, and brachydactylism.2

Still other traits are sex-limited. Typically, such sex-limited traits show themselves only in males; these males do not have affected children and their sons, in

2 Italicised names are those of diseases that have been best studied, and of whose method of inheritance we are best assured. Names followed by a query (?) are those of diseases whose inheritance has not been sufficiently studied.

deed, do not carry the defect in their germ plasm. But the daughters do carry the defect in half of their germ cells and since the sons of such a woman have an equal chance of coming from tainted and non-tainted germ cells, half of the sons will show the defect. But the sis

ters (unless their father show the defect somatically) will not show it though half of them may transmit it to half of their sons. The following cases have not all been worked out completely; some pedigrees even show apparent exceptions, but the rule as given above seems to hold for them as a first approximation. These sexlimited traits are: colour blindness, atrophy of the optic nerve, hemophilia, muscular atrophy, multiple sclerosis, nystagmus and myopia (in some families).

While many traits of man are clearly due to a single factor, others are complex and due to two or more facThus the skin pigment of the full-blooded West Coast African negro is produced under the stimulus of two duplex (four somatic) determiners. Consequently inheritance is complicated in this case.

The great work of the future in eugenics is to determine as accurately as possible the law of heredity of

each human trait.

Eugenics as a social science in its application to normal stock is effective, however, only if it is applied; and if persons actually make use of its conclusions in selecting marriage mates. Here is where, in the minds of many, eugenics as an applied science is bound to fail. Every one knows, indeed, how powerful are the bonds of affection between a young man and a young woman. who have fallen in love and how little influence the advice and protest of relatives and friends often has