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time unpublished.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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