The scientific foundations for the slowly rising science of "eugenics"
grow apace in the research laboratories of our universities. Some of
their most authoritative representatives demonstrated this fact at
the recent joint meeting of the Physicians' Club of Chicago and the
Chicago Medical Society. In strictly scientific spirit and phrase, with
interesting stereopticon illustrations of their biological experiments,
four professors brought their facts to bear upon the doctors for their
inferences as to the analogy between the heredity in animal and plant
life, and the development of human kind. Two professors of zoology,
Dr. Castle of Harvard and Dr. Tower of the University of Chicago gave
respectively "an experimental study of heredity," and "experiments
and observations on the modification and the control of inheritance."
A beautiful parallel was presented by Dr. Gates, professor of botany
at the University of Chicago, in studies of inheritance in the
evening primrose. Dean Davenport of the College of Agriculture at the
University of Illinois ventured the most direct application of the
suggestions from scientific experimentations to the propagation of the
human race. Drawing the lessons to be learned from the breeding of
animals, he said that the question preliminary to any consideration
of the subject is "whether the end of our breeding is to be the
production of a few superior individuals, or the general elevation of
the race. If it is the first, we must proceed as in the breeding of
thoroughbred race horses; if it is the second, as in the production of
good fat stock for the farm." Preferential mating, he thinks, produces
in the long run, persons of exceptional talent. "Like mates with
like, and people with exceptional ability in any line are naturally
thrown together by their common tastes and thus uniting bring forth
phenomenal individuals in all lines." The solution of the problem of
the deterioration of the stock lies, he thinks, not so much in stricter
marriage laws, as in the absolute prevention of reproduction among "the
culls, human as well as animal." To colonize other classes of the unfit
as strictly as we do the insane is the only way he sees of doing this.
"Let a man be taken into court and his ancestor record investigated.
If we find his parents were dominantly bad, it means that he is fifty
per cent bad. If his grand parents were also bad, he is twenty-five
per cent more bad. When he gets to ninety per cent bad, it is certain
that he must be colonized. There is a strict mathematical law that runs
through it all."
Whatever may be thought of such definite suggestions, it is too true
as the secretary of the Physicians' Club affirms, that "man is at a
distinct disadvantage when compared with domestic animals in being
denied 'good' breeding. He is the child of chance and so to speak is
born, not bred." Surely, however slowly, the science of improving the
propagation of the human race will receive its recognition as having
place among the hierarchy of the sciences and will be practically
applied by those who respect themselves and have any regard for their
posterity.