subject to these same laws? Can he not use his knowledge of them to improve his own species, as he has been more or less consciously improving the plants and animals that were of most value to him, for many centuries?"
The evolutionist answered both these questions affirmatively. However great may be the superiority of his mind, man is first of all an animal, subject to the natural laws that govern other animals. He can learn to comply with these laws; he can, therefore, take an active share in furthering the process of evolution toward a higher life.
That, briefly, is the scope of the science of eugenics, as its founder, Sir Francis Galton, conceived it. "Now that this new animal, man, finds himself somehow in existence, endowed with a little power and intelligence," Galton wrote 30 years ago, "he ought, I submit, to awake to a fuller knowledge of his relatively great position, and begin to assume a deliberate part in furthering the great work of evolution. He may infer the course it is bound to pursue, from his observation of that which it has already followed, and he might devote his modicum of power, intelligence and kindly feeling to render its future progress less slow and painful. Man has already furthered evolution very considerably, half consciously, and for his own personal advantages, but he has not yet risen to the conviction that it is his religious duty to do so, deliberately and systematically."
But, it may well be asked, how does this sudden need for eugenics arise, when the world has gone along without it for hundreds of millions of years in the past, and the human race has made the great ascent from an ape-like condition in spite of the fact that such a science as eugenics was never dreamed of?
For answer recall that natural selection, which is mainly responsible for bringing man to his present situation, has worked chiefly through a