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"Almost if not every department of social progress and of the public weal has felt the impulse of his healthy and long-lived family. It is not known that any one of them was ever convicted of crime."

WHEN THE DRAG IS REMOVED.

The eugenist believes that the human stock can be developed into families of his character when the drag of the unfit has been removed; when the biologist has traced more fully the effect of combinations of physical and psychic characteristics, and when society has been educated o the point of raising the requirements for marriage. For the eliminations of the incubus of defective stock segregation and sterilization have been suggested. Connecticut, Indiana, and New Jersey have sterilization laws. For the mating of the fit it has been proposed that person be completed to submit to examination before hey marry, and marriages of those who are found unfit prohibited. In one of the Pacific colonies of Great Britain it is reported that this suggestion is made more practicable by simply requiring the examination, leaving it to the consciences of the parties to decide whether they shall act upon the results or not. The eugenist also believes that many of the fit who are not now permitted to marry should be allowed to do so. Such include clergymen and, in England, nurses.

Dr. Goddard, of Vineland, said to a representative of The Tribune a few days ago regarding eugenics and what has been learned regarding he transmissible characteristics of the unfit:

"The ideal of eugenics seems to me to be the building up of a higher race by the elimination of the defectives and the improvement of the stock. In respect to the latter, I think, as we come to know the laws of heredity their application will become general among the intelligent, and the improvement of the race will become self-regulating. Those who are conscious of a strain of undesirable characteristics which are transmissible will then refrain from marriage. Up to the present time we have insufficient accurate knowledge regarding the influence of heredity. Among the results is that some are denying themselves marriage needlessly. Take the matter of insanity. There are some kinds that are transmissible; some that are not. It is not clear in regard o all of them. Eugenists are working on this now.

REACHING THE SOLUTION.

"That is just where the work of the eugenist comes in. The whole question of heredity and environment needs to be thrashed out. We have a study going on just now showing the two streams of environment and heredity. There is an enormous group of degenerates mingled with the defectives. I went to a school a week or two ago and found a number of children of low grade parents that tested almost normal. This suggested that the parents, who were in some cases of particularly good families, were degenerates-persons who had gone to pieces under the stress of environment. Outwardly you cannot always tell the difference. The defective and the degenerate look much alike frequently. There is still much to be learned regarding the boundary line between heredity and environment. The two work together. As Dr. C.B. Davenport says, however, if you plant wheat you will always get wheat, but if you plant it in poor soil you will get poor wheat and if in good soil you will get good wheat.

"There has not been a great amount of work done on different diseases. It has been confined chiefly to epilepsy, some types of insanity and feeble-mindedness. Probably there are a great many f our functional diseases, like tuberculosis, which are not transmissible, but weak constitutions may be passed on. I believe that immunity to given diseases may also be transmitted. "An acquaintance told me that there were certain ailments which never worried him and to the cure of which he gave little care, knowing from his family history that he had little to fear from them. But his familiarity with the causes of death in a number of cases in his family led him to take marked precautions whenever ailing form anything which might lead to a certain trouble. It is not impossible that the theory that the Jews, accustomed to life in bad sanitary conditions in crowded ghettoes for centuries, have become immune to tubercular diseases and withstand the perils of congestion in our cities better than those of other races. Dr. Davenport is working on the heredity of disease, but there is a great deal to be done.

SOURCE OF THE CRIMINAL.

"The criminal, I think, is the product of feeble-mindedness and environment. If you have a feeble-minded person the probabilities are tremendously strong that he will become a criminal. It would take a pretty bad environment to make a criminal out of a normal person. The word 'criminal' might jus as well have been omitted from the New Jersey sterilization law, for the end would have been gained just as well and there would be less antagonistic feeling regarding it. While we have not obtained all the data we want on this subject, yet we have made several little studies which indicate that at least 5 per cent of the criminals are feeble-minded. The superintendent of the Elmira Reformatory says he thinks that 40 per cent of his inmates are feeble-minded. Recently we tested one hundred Juvenile Court children in the detention house at Newark. Of these, thirty-four were found to be backward, with the chances hat some of them would later prove to be feeble-minded. These children were taken just as they came. No selection was made. They were cases sufficiently important for detention for further disposition of the court.