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Early Anthropological Researches   79

you may marry a woman of gifted stock and fertile parents also, and yet have no need to ask the `Senior Trustee of the Endowment Fund' to maintain and educate children, if they are denied you. There are not only the physical and mental, but the physiological harmonies to be considered and of these the `Senior Trustee' does not give us a hint. In later years Galton modified his views; he would, I think, have been content to grade physically and mentally mankind, and have urged that marriage within your own grade was a religious duty for those of high grade or caste.

In the second part of his paper Galton adds a number of interesting considerations and meets probable criticisms. Thus he starts with the statement that out of a hundred sons of men highly distinguished in the open professions eight are found to have rivalled their fathers in eminence'. But Galton considers that the mother has in most of these cases been selected `at haphazard.' He points out that, where even both parents are of eminence, it would be absurd to expect their children to be on the average equal to them in natural endowment, because beyond the parents they would necessarily have much `mongrel' ancestry.

"No one, I think," he writes, "can doubt, from the facts and analogies I have brought forward, that if talented men were mated with talented women of the same mental and physical characters as themselves, generation after generation, we might produce a highly-bred human race, with

no more tendency to revert to meaner ancestral types than is shown by our long-established breeds of race-horses and fox-hounds." (p. 319.)

In this passage we see Galton feeling towards the effect of (what I later termed) 'assortative mating,' and pointing to the `mongrelisrn' of previous ancestry as the true source of his own `law of regression.'

Galton next indicates that while marriage within the like intellectual grade would tend to differentiate society into two grades or castes objection may be raised that it would not tend to elevate society as a whole2. He suggests that (what I have later termed) `reproductive selection' would or should be called into play. In the first place natural selection, he considers, would powerfully assist in the substitution of the higher caste A for the lower caste B by pressing heavily on the minority of weakly and incapable men. He did not at that time seem to have recognised that, while in the 'sixties the fertilities of the two castes were-what they no longer are-very nearly equal, the whole course of modern social evolution has been to suspend the action of natural selection. Galton did see, however, that a differential fertility has to be brought about, and he suggested that if intermarriage between A and B be looked upon with strong disapproval, so the early marriage of A and the discouragement or postponement of that of B would be "agencies amply sufficient to eliminate B in a few generations."


' I am not clear that Galton here accurately expresses the result deducible from his figures. I cannot find that he has allowed for size of adult family-at most say an average of 2J sons. If so, then we ought to say out of the 100 sons of distinguished men a little over three on the average would be distinguished, which statement would still be ample to prove Galton's point.

2 It would tend to produce more and stronger leaders for the nation which adopted it, which after all may be more important than elevating society as a whole, especially if we lay stress on Qalton's herd analogies.