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218   Life and Letters of Francis Galton

faith. We know little of how it came about that Aurignacian man replaced Mousterian man; but the ascent was a steep one, and man needs once more some such rapid elevating. With our present acquaintance with the laws of heredity, with our present knowledge of how customs and creeds have changed, can we not hasten the evolutionary process of fitting man to the needs of his present environment? It is indeed a great task because it involves control of the most imperious instinct of living beings, so imperious that Nature's method of improvement has been to provide quantity and seek therein for quality. The new creed bids us seek quality and restrict quantity; separate, where race demands it, the scarce controllable instinct of mating from the parental instinct, and teach nations to pride themselves on the superior type of their citizens, rather than on their material resources. The eugenic dreamer sees in the distant future a rivalry of nations in the task of bringing to greater perfection their human stocks, and this by an intensive study of' biological law applied to man, and its incorporation, it may be gradually, but surely, in a revised moral or social code.

(2) Address to the Demographers. A paper which bridges the gulf between the Inquiry into Human Faculty of 1883 and the Huxley Lecture of 1901 is Galton's " Presidential Address "of August 11, 1891, to the Division of Demography of the Seventh International Congress of Hygiene and Demography *. The word " Eugenics " does not occur in the address, it has no topical title, and yet it is an insistent demand for the study, of eugenic problems.- The paper has escaped and is likely to escape attention, it is not as far as I am aware included in any list of Galton's published papers, nor are copies of it among his offprints or in the bound volumes of his memoirs. Yet the address is of very great interest, not only for its intrinsic suggestiveness, but because it shows how during twenty years Eugenics had retained a foremost place in Galton's mind. His appeal, however, produced as little effect on the demographers as it did later on the anthropologists.

The topics with which the address deals are the relative fertility of various classes within a nation, and the relative fertility of nations among themselves-intranational and international fertilities-whereby tendencies arise for one class or one race to supplant another. Referring to the hypothesis of Malthus, Galton asks

" Is it true that misery, in any justifiable sense of that word, provides the only check which acts automatically, or are other causes in existence, active, though as yet obscure, that assist in restraining the overgrowth of population? It is certain that the productiveness of different

marriages differs greatly in consequence of unexplained conditions... .One of the many evidences of our great ignorance of the laws that govern fertility, is seen in the behaviour of bees, who have somehow discovered that by merely modifying the diet and the size of the nursery of any female grub, they can at will cause it to develop, either into a naturally sterile worker, or into

the potential mother of a huge hive." (p. 8.)

Galton is here foreshadowing the sterilisation of those sections of the community of small civic worth, which has since become a pressing question of practical politics. He suggests that if persons are graded in a nation on

* Transactions of that Congress, pp. 7-12, London, 1892.


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