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Inquiries into Human Faculty
and inserting other interesting personal facts and whatever anthropometric
data can be collected.
Those who care to initiate and carry on a family chronicle illustrated
by abundant photographic portraiture, will produce a work that they and
their children and their descendants in more remote generations will
assuredly be grateful for. The family tie has a real as well as a traditional
significance. The world is beginning to awaken to the fact that the life of
the individual is in some real sense a prolongation of those of his ancestry.
His vigour, his character, and his diseases are principally derived from
theirs; sometimes his faculties are blends of ancestral qualities; but more
frequently they are mosaics, patches of resemblance to one or other of
them showing now here and now there. The life-histories of our relatives
are prophetic of our own futures; they are far more instructive to us than
those of strangers, far more fitted to encourage and to forewarn us. If there
be such a thing as a natural birthright, I can conceive of none superior to
the right of the child to be informed, at first by proxy through his
guardians, and afterwards personally, of the life-history, medical and
other, of his ancestry. The child is thrust into existence without his having
any voice at all in the matter, and the smallest amend that those who
brought him here can make, is to furnish him with all the guidance they
can, including the complete life-histories of his near progenitors.
The investigation of human eugenics—that is, of the conditions under
which men of a high type are produced—is at present extremely hampered
by the want of full family histories, both medical and general, extending
over three or four generations. There is no such difficulty in investigating
animal eugenics, because the generations of horses, cattle, dogs, etc., are
brief, and the breeder of any such stock lives long enough to acquire a
large amount of experience from his own personal observation. A man,
however, can rarely be familiar with more than two or three generations of
his contemporaries before age has begun to check his powers; his working
experience must therefore be chiefly based upon records. Believing, as I
do, that human eugenics will become recognised before long as a study of
the highest practical importance, it seems to me that no time ought to be
lost in encouraging and directing a habit of compiling
