On this subject the well-known naturalist, Mr. A. R. Wallace, has some judicious remarks in an article on "Human Progress, Past and Future," in _The Arena_ for January, 1892. Mr. Wallace, who accepts the views of Weismann as to the non-inheritance of acquired characters, thinks that the physical and moral evils and degradation attendant on the conditions of modern city life will have no permanent effects, when a more rational and elevating system of social organization is brought about. The most important agency in this social regeneration will be the selective action of woman, under the influence of her newly acquired freedom and higher education. Says Mr. Wallace: "When such social changes have been effected that no woman will be compelled, either by hunger, isolation or social compulsion, to sell herself, whether in or out of wedlock, and when all women alike shall feel the refining influence of a true harmonizing education, of beautiful and elevating surroundings, and of a public opinion which shall be founded on the highest aspirations of their age and country, the result will be a form of human selection which will bring about a continuous advance in the average status of the race. Under such conditions, all who are deformed either in body or mind, though they may be able to lead happy and contented lives, will, as a rule, leave no children to inherit their deformity. Even now we find many women who do not marry because they have never found the man of their ideal. When no woman will be compelled to marry for a bare living or for a comfortable home, those who remain unmarried from their own free choice will certainly increase in number, while many others, having no inducement to an early marriage, will wait until they meet with a partner who is really congenial to them. In such a reformed society the vicious man, the man of degraded taste or of feeble intellect, will have little chance of finding a wife, and his bad qualities will die out with himself. The most perfect and beautiful in body and mind will, on the other hand, be most sought and therefore be most likely to marry early, the less highly endowed later, and the least gifted in any way the latest of all; and this will be the case with both sexes. From this varying age of marriage, as Mr. Galton has shown, there will result a more rapid increase of the former than of the latter, and this cause continuing at work for successive generations will at length bring the average man to be the equal of those who are now among the more advanced of the race."