The recommendation I would venture to make to my readers is to obtain photographs and ordinary measurements periodically of themselves and their children, making it a family custom to do so, because, unless driven by some custom, the act will be postponed until the opportunity is lost.  Let those periodical photographs be full and side views of the face on an adequate scale, adding any others that may be wished, but not omitting these.  As the portraits accumulate have collections of them autotyped.  Keep the prints methodically in a family register, writing by their side careful chronicles of illness and all such events as used to find a place on the fly-leaf of the Bible of former generations, 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 personal and family histories.  If the necessary materials be brought into existence, it will require no more than zeal and persuasiveness on the part of the future investigator to collect as large a store of them as he may require.