PREFACE

There are at least two sides to every question. Usually there are

several times two sides; or at least there are several phases in which

the question has a different aspect.

I am led to state these seemingly unnecessary truisms because I have

been confronted by hearers or readers who assumed, since I had presented

a certain phase or manifestation of heredity in a given article

or lecture, that I was intending to argue that a fixed rule of

transmission would necessarily follow the line I had then and there

drawn.

Nothing could be farther from my idea of the workings of the law of

heredity.

Nothing could be more absurdly inadequate to the solution and

comprehension of a great basic principle.

Again; an auditor or critic remarks that "We must not forget that we,

also, get our heredity from God;" which is much as if one were to say,

in teaching the multiplication table, "Remember that three times three

is nine except, only, the times when God makes it fifteen." So absolute

a misconception of the very meaning of the word heredity could hardly be

illustrated in any other way as in the idea of "getting it from God."

Scientific terms and facts of this nature cannot be confounded with

metaphysical and religious speculation without hopeless confusion as

to ideas, and absolute worthlessness as to the results of the

investigation.

The very foundation principle of Evolution, itself, depends upon the

persistence of the laws of hereditary traits, habits and conditions,

modified and diversified by environment and by the introduction of other

hereditary strains from other lines of ancestry.

Of course, there are people who do not believe that Evolution evolves

with any greater degree of regularity and persistence than is consistent

with the idea of a Deity who is liable to change his plans to meet the

prayers or plaints of aspiration or repentance of those who chance to

beg or demand of him certain immunities from the workings of the laws of

nature. But with this type of mentality--with this grade of intellectual

grasp--it were fruitless to pause to argue. They must be left to an

education and an evolution of a less emotional and imaginative cast

before they will be able to take part intelligently in a scientific

discussion even where the merest alphabet of the science is touched, as

is the case in these essays. They must learn a method of thought which

keeps inside of what is, or can be, known and demonstrated, and cease

to vitiate the very basic premises by injecting into them what is merely

hoped or prayed for. The two phases of thought are quite distinct and

totally dissimilar in method.

The essays here collected, which do not deal directly with heredity

and its possibilities, have been included in the book because of the

repeated calls for them upon the different magazines in which they

appeared and because they are rightly classed among the facts and

fictions of life with which we wish here to deal.

That most of them touch chiefly the dark side of the topics discussed

is due to the fact that they were one and all written for a purpose in

which that method of handling seemed most effective. That there is a

brighter side goes without saying; but when a physician is writing a

lecture upon cholera or consumption he does not devote his time and

space to pointing out the indubitable fact that many of us have not, and

are not likely to contract, either one.

In pointing out and commenting upon certain social and hereditary

conditions and evils, which it is desirable to correct or to guard

against, and which it is all-important we shall first recognize as

existing and as in need of improvement, I have, it is true, dwelt

chiefly upon the evil possibilities contained in these conditions. I am

not, therefore, a pessimist. I do not fail to recognize the fact that

both men and conditions are undoubtedly evolving into better and higher

states than of old. If one may so express it, these essays are the

expressions of a pessimistic optimist,--one who is pessimistic upon

certain phases of the present for the present, and optimistic as to and

for the future. Let me illustrate: The housewife who does not have the

house cleaned because it stirs up a dust to do it, is in the position

of those critics who insist that it is all wrong to call attention to

abuses because abuses are not pleasant things to have held up to public

gaze. Or like a physician who would say: "For heaven's sake don't remove

that bandage from the broken skull to dress the wound or you will see

something even uglier than this soiled and ill-arranged cloth. Trust to

luck. Some people have recovered from even worse conditions than this

without intelligent care and treatment. Let him do it."

I have often been asked how and why I ever chanced to think or to write

upon these topics. "How can a woman in your station and of your type

know about them?" It is always difficult to say just how or why one mind

_does_ and another does _not_ grasp any given thing.

When I was a very young girl I heard a famous Judge read and discuss

a series of papers which were then appearing in the Popular Science

Monthly, and which were called "The Relations Of Women To Crime." I was

the only person admitted to the Club, where the consideration of the

papers took place, who was not mature in years and connected with one of

the learned professions. I was admitted because I begged the privilege

as the guest of the family of the Judge at whose house the Club met.

More than any other one thing, perhaps, the thoughts and suggestions

that came to me--a silent and unnoticed child--while listening to the

discussions of those papers which hinted at the various possibilities of

inherited criminal tendencies--hearing the lawyers comment upon it from

the point of view furnished by their court-room experiences, and the

medical men from their side of the topic, as practitioners upon those

who had inherited mental or physical diseases, and the educators from

their outlook and experience with children and youths who had not yet

begun an open criminal course but who showed in their tendencies

the need of intelligent training to modify or correct their faulty

inheritance,--more than any other one thing, perhaps, this experience

of my childhood led me into the study of anthropology and heredity. That

other people have been interested in what I have written from time

to time upon this subject, and that I was, for this reason, asked

to present certain phases of it at the recent World's Congress of

Representative Women, accounts for the publication of this book at this

time. I presume it will be said that it is not "pleasant reading for the

summer season." It is not intended for that purpose. It has been

asked for by many teachers, college professors, students and medical

practitioners, the latter of whom have shown extraordinary interest in

its early issue and wide circulation, and for whose kind encouragement

and aid I am glad to offer here renewed thanks.

I had intended to elaborate and enlarge and republish in book form "Sex

IN Brain," but since there have been hundreds of calls made for it and

since I have not yet found the time to combine, verify and arrange

the large amount of additional material which I have been steadily

collecting through correspondence with leading Anthropologists and brain

Anatomists in England, Scotland, Germany, France and the United States

and other countries, ever since they received, with such cordial and

kindly recognition, the within printed essay, which they have had

translated into several languages, I have concluded to include it

with these, leaving it as it was abridged and delivered before the

International Council in Washington in 1888.

Later on I hope to find time to arrange and verify and issue the new

material on the subject. It has grown in confirmatory evidence as it has

grown in bulk, with steady and assuring regularity.

Helen Hamilton Gardener.