The next and a very important step towards Eugenics was made by Professor Karl Pearson in his Huxley Lecture of 1903 entitled ‘The Laws of Inheritance in Man’ (Biometrika, vol. iii). It contains a most valuable compendium of work achieved and of objects in view; also the following passage (p. 159), which is preceded by forcible reasons for his conclusions:
We are ceasing as a nation to breed intelligence as we did fifty to a hundred years ago. The mentally better stock in the nation is not reproducing itself at the same rate as it did of old; the less able and the less energetic are more fertile than the better stocks. No scheme of wider or more thorough education will bring up, in the scale of intelligence, hereditary weakness to the level of hereditary strength. The only remedy, if one be possible at all, is to alter the relative fertility of the good and the bad stocks in the community.
Again in 1904, having been asked by the newly-formed Sociological Society to contribute a memoir, I did so on ‘Eugenics, its definition, aim and scope.’ This was followed up in 1905 by three memoirs, ‘Restrictions in Marriage,’ ‘Studies in National Eugenics,’ and ‘Eugenics as a factor in Religion,’ which were published in the Memoirs of that Society with comments thereon by more than twenty different authorities (Sociological Papers, published for the Sociological Society (Macmillan), vols. i and ii. These are re-published here). The subject of Eugenics being thus formally launched, and the time appearing ripe, I offered a small endowment to the University of London, to found a Research Fellowship on its behalf. The offer was cordially accepted, so Eugenics gained the recognition of its importance by the University of London and a home for its study in University College. Mr. Edgar Schuster, of this University, became Research Fellow in 1905, and I am much indebted to his care in nurturing the young undertaking and for the memoirs he has contributed, part of which must still remain for a short time unpublished.