One other subject deserves consideration, when I will bring this chapter to a close. Every child born into the world is, to a certain extent, an experiment. That is to say, the parents cannot predict its sex, nor what its chief characteristics will be. These depend on what potentialities are stored up in the germ plasm. If this be formed by parents in good health, with a surplus of vital force, and a long line of ancestors with normal lives, we may believe that if the environment be favorable, the child will develop so as to show the same characteristics, perhaps in an even higher degree. Whatever variations there are will not be much below or above the average line of its ancestors. The congenital characters will tend to be transmitted. They are in the germ plasm, even in great detail. Whether the acquired ones are transmitted may still be uncertain; but whether they are or not, normal right living will be sure to have good effects. Obey the laws of life and far better results will follow than if they are disobeyed. FEWER AND BETTER CHILDREN. In the present age suggestions on this subject may seem superfluous. The more highly educated and wealthy classes have already sufficiently reduced the number of children which they bring into the world. But are these offspring any better than they would have been had their parents given birth to a larger number? Mr. Darwin did not think much could be done to improve the race by parents limiting the number of their offspring. He would trust to natural selection to weed out the unfit, and to sexual selection as an aid. He thus describes the probable manner of action of sexual selection among primeval men: "The strongest and most vigorous men--those who could best defend and hunt for their families; those who were provided with the best weapons and possessed the most property, such as a large number of dogs or other animals--would succeed in rearing a greater average number of offspring than the weaker and poorer members of the same tribes. Such men would doubtless generally be able to select the more attractive women. . . . If, then, this be admitted, it would be an unexplainable circumstance if the selection of the more attractive women by the more powerful men of the tribes, who would rear on the average a greater number of children, did not, after the lapse of generations, _modify the character of the tribes_." The way in which the tribe would be modified would be by its producing better children. Of course among primitive men the richer and more powerful had several wives, but it is not likely that the number of children by each one was large.