yet larger influence they might be expected to have if they were directed not to thwart but to harmonise with natural inclination, by promoting early marriages in the classes to be favoured.  I also showed that a powerful influence might flow from a public recognition in early life of the true value of the probability of future performance, as based on the past performance of the ancestors of the child.  It is an element of forecast, in addition to that of present personal merit, which has yet to be appraised and recognised.  Its recognition would attract assistance in various ways, impossible now to specify, to the young families of those who were most likely to stock the world with healthy, moral, intelligent, and fair-natured citizens.  The stream of charity is not unlimited, and it is requisite for the speedier evolution of a more perfect humanity that it should be so distributed as to favour the best-adapted races.  I have not spoken of the repression of the rest, believing that it would ensue indirectly as a matter of course; but I may add that few would deserve better of their country than those who determine to live celibate lives, through a reasonable conviction that their issue would probably be less fitted than the generality to play their part as citizens.

It would be easy to add to the number of possible agencies by which the evolution of a higher humanity might be furthered, but it is premature to do so until the importance of attending to the improvement of our race shall have been so well established in the popular mind that a discussion of them would be likely to receive serious consideration.

It is hardly necessary to insist on the certainty that our present imperfect knowledge of the limitations and conditions of hereditary transmission will be steadily added to; but I would call attention again to the serious want of adequate materials for study in the form of life-histories.  It is fortunately the case that many of the rising medical practitioners of the foremost rank are become strongly impressed with the necessity of possessing them, not only for the better knowledge of the theory of disease, but for the personal advantage of their patients, whom they now have to treat less appropriately than they otherwise would, through ignorance of their hereditary tendencies and of their illnesses in past years, the medical details of which are rarely remembered by the patient, even if he ever knew them.  With the help of so powerful a personal motive for keeping life-histories, and of so influential a body as the medical profession to advocate its being done,[21] and to show how to do it, there is considerable hope that the want of materials to which I have alluded will gradually be supplied.

[Footnote 21:  See an address on the Collective Investigation of Disease, by Sir William Gull, British Medical Journal, January 27, 1883, p. 143; also the following address by Sir James Paget, p. 144.]