To spread throughout the British Empire such knowledge of eugenics as might be gathered by specialists, the Eugenics Education Society was formed in 1908 with Galton as honorary president. Its field comprises: (1) Biology in so far as it concerns hereditary selection; (2) Anthropology as related to race and marriage; (3) Politics, where it bears on parenthood in relation to civic worth; (4) Ethics, in so far as it promotes ideals that lead to the improvement of social quality; (5) Religion, in so far as it strengthens and sanctifies eugenic duty.
In America the movement got an early start but developed slowly. The first definite step was the formation of an Institute of Heredity in Boston, shortly after 1880, by Loring Moody, who was assisted by the poet Longfellow, Samuel E. Sewall, Mrs. Horace Mann, and other well-known people. He proposed to work very much along the lines that the Eugenics Record Office later adopted, but he was ahead of his time, and his attempt seems to have come to nothing.
In 1883 Alexander Graham Bell, who may be considered the first scientific worker in eugenics in the United States, published a paper on the danger of the formation of a deaf variety of the human race in this country, in which he gave the result of researches he had made at Martha's Vineyard and other localities during preceding years, on the pedigrees of congenitally deaf persons—deaf mutes, as they were then called. He showed clearly that congenital deafness is largely due to heredity, that it is much increased by consanguineous marriages, and that it is of great importance to prevent the marriage of persons, in both of whose families congenital deafness is present. About five years later he founded the Volta Bureau in Washington, D. C., for the study of deafness, and this has fostered a great deal of research work on this particular phase of heredity.
In 1903 the American Breeders' Association was founded at St. Louis by plant and animals breeders who desired to keep in touch with the new