To demand compulsory certificates of health at marriage is indeed to begin at the wrong end.  It would not only lead to evasions and antagonisms but would probably call forth a reaction.  It is first necessary to create an enthusiasm for health, a moral conscience in matters of procreation, together with, on the scientific side, a general habit of registering the anthropological, psychological, and pathological data concerning the individual, from birth onwards, altogether apart from marriage.  The earlier demands of Diday and Bertillon were thus not only on a sounder but also a more practicable basis.  If such records were kept from birth for every child, there would be no need for special examination at marriage, and many incidental ends would be gained.  There is difficulty at present in obtaining such records from the moment of birth, and, so far as I am aware, no attempts have yet been made to establish their systematic registration.  But it is quite possible to begin at the beginning of school life, and this is now done at many schools and colleges in England, America, and elsewhere, more especially as regards anthropological, physiological, and psychological data, each child being submitted to a thorough and searching anthropometric examination, and thus furnished with a systematic statement of his physical condition.[458] This examination needs to be standardized and generalized, and repeated at fixed intervals.  “Every individual child,” as is truly stated by Dr. Dukes, the Physician to Rugby School, “on his entrance to a public school should be as carefully and as thoroughly examined as if it were for life insurance.”  If this procedure were general from an early age, there would be no hardship in the production of the record at marriage, and no opportunity for fraud.  The dossier of each person might well be registered by the State, as wills already are, and, as in the case of wills, become freely open to students when a century had elapsed.  Until this has been done during several centuries our knowledge of eugenics will remain rudimentary.

There can be little doubt that the eugenic attitude towards marriage, and the responsibility of the individual for the future of the race, is becoming more recognized.  It is constantly happening that persons, about to marry, approach the physician in a state of serious anxiety on this point.  Urquhart, indeed (Journal of Mental Science, April, 1907, p. 277), believes that marriages are seldom broken off on this ground; this seems, however, too pessimistic a view, and even when the marriage is not broken off the resolve is often made to avoid procreation.  Clouston, who emphasizes (Hygiene of the Mind, p. 74) the importance of “inquiries by each of the parties to the life-contract, by their parents and their doctors, as to heredity, temperament, and health,” is more hopeful of the results than Urquhart.  “I have been very much impressed, of late years,” he writes (Journal of