individuals as the prime condition of life.  Here we have the science of eugenics which Sir Francis Galton has done so much to make a definite, vital, and practical study, and which in its wider bearings he defines as “the science which deals with those social eugenics that influence, mentally or physically, the racial qualities of future generations.”  In its largest aspect, eugenics is, as Galton has elsewhere said, man’s attempt “to replace Natural Selection by other processes that are more merciful and not less effective.”

In the last chapter of his Memories of My Life (1908), on “Race Improvement,” Sir Francis Galton sets forth the origin and development of his conception of the science of eugenics.  The term, “eugenics,” he first used in 1884, in his Human Faculty, but the conception dates from 1865, and even earlier.  Galton has more recently discussed the problems of eugenics in papers read before the Sociological Society (Sociological Papers, vols. i and ii, 1905), in the Herbert Spencer Lecture on “Probability the Foundation of Eugenics,” (1907), and elsewhere.  Galton’s numerous memoirs on this subject have now been published in a collected form by the Eugenics Education Society, which was established in 1907, to further and to popularize the eugenical attitude towards social questions; The Eugenics Review is published by this Society.  On the more strictly scientific side, eugenic studies are carried on in the Eugenics Laboratory of the University of London, established by Sir Francis Galton, and now working in connection with Professor Karl Pearson’s biometric laboratory, in University College.  Much of Professor Pearson’s statistical work in this and allied directions, is the elaboration of ideas and suggestions thrown out by Galton.  See, e.g., Karl Pearson’s Robert Boyle Lecture, “The Scope and Importance to the State of the Science of National Eugenics” (1907). Biometrika, edited by Karl Pearson in association with other workers, contains numerous statistical memoirs on eugenics.  In Germany, the Archiv fuer Rassen und Gesellschafts-biologie, and the Politisch-Anthropologische Revue, are largely occupied with various aspects of such subjects, and in America, The Popular Science Monthly from time to time, publishes articles which have a bearing on eugenics.

At one time there was a tendency to scoff, or to laugh, at the eugenic movement.  It was regarded as an attempt to breed men as men breed animals, and it was thought a sufficiently easy task to sweep away this new movement with the remark that love laughs at bolts and bars.  It is now beginning to be better understood.  None but fanatics dream of abolishing love in order to effect pairing by rule.  It is merely a question of limiting the possible number of mates from whom each may select a partner, and that, we must remember, has always been done even by savages, for, as it has been said, “eugenics