During the last few years the subject of race improvement, or Eugenics, has been greatly to the fore, and it has been in this country mainly connected with the name of Sir Francis Galton, who as long ago as 1865 published his views on the subject. Eugenics is officially defined in the Minutes of the University of London as “the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally.” A eugenics laboratory has recently been established in University College, London, in connection with Professor Karl Pearson’s biometric laboratory. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER VI. THE CLASSIFICATION AND DISTRIBUTION OF MAN [Sidenote: =Race Description and Classification.=] After the age of race discrimination comes the age of race description and classification; and, as we should expect, this second stage is not reached until the close of the Dark Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance, when thought had been emancipated from the bondage of scholastic authority and stimulated by the new impulse which infected all forms of intellectual activity. [Sidenote: =Bernier.=] The first attempt at the classification of mankind was that of a French traveller, F. Bernier (1625-1688), whose scheme appeared in an anonymous article in the _Journal des Scavans_, 1684, entitled “A new division of the earth, according to the different species or races of men who inhabit it,” etc.[65] Footnote 65: See T. Bendyshe, _Mem. Anth. Soc._, I., 1865, p. 360. He distinguished “four or five species or races”: (1) The inhabitants of Europe, North Africa (including the Egyptians), and a great part of Asia (including the Indians). He notes that the Egyptians and Indians are black or copper-coloured, but considered the complexion to be due to climate. (2) The Africans, with thick lips, flat noses, and black skins, due not to climate but nature, with scanty beard and woolly hair. (3) The Asiatics not included in the first group, white, with “broad shoulders, a flat face, a small squab nose, little pig’s-eyes long and deep-set, and three hairs of beard.” (4) The Lapps, “little stunted creatures, with thick legs, large shoulders, short neck, and a face elongated immensely; very ugly, and partaking much of the bear; they are wretched animals.” He hesitates whether to put the Americans or the inhabitants of South Africa, who are unlike the Negroes, into a fifth class. The latter are probably the Hottentots or Bushmen, in spite of his statement that “some of the Dutch say they speak _turkey_.” [Sidenote: =Linnæus.=]