That the choice of personal love at present appears often either to lack or to oppose this instinct, is no proof that it will always lack or oppose it. Love’s selection has already in certain cases—such as those of near blood-relations, different races, and certain diseases—become an instinct, since law and custom have influenced selection sufficiently long for this to have influenced feeling and instinct. At the present time brother and sister—since they are aware of their relationship—seldom have to suppress a mutual erotic feeling, as such a thing does not arise. No prohibition, but only all the impulses of her blood, hinder the American woman from marrying a negro or a Chinese. The woman who is known to have epilepsy is excluded from marriage less by the law, in this case easily circumvented, than by the fact that no man wants her as his wife. On the other hand, it is known that under conditions favourable to the cultivation of the beauty and strength of the human body, this has in a great degree influenced the erotic selection of either sex—so far as they otherwise possessed freedom of choice. The law of inheritance, which makes it easy for the degenerate to contract marriage, and women’s need of maintenance have, on the other hand, falsified the instinct of the latter in this direction. The prevailing customs and ideas of morality have as a rule deprived future mothers of their full freedom of choice and thus to a great extent neutralised the importance of womanly love’s selection for the spiritual and bodily improvement of the race. To this must be added that the Christian doctrine of fraternity, the eighteenth-century doctrine of equality, the transference of economical power to the third estate—in a word, the whole democratisation of society—have broken down the laws and customs which prevented the mixing of blood between different classes and races. This has certainly favoured the selection of personal love, but at the same time, to a greater extent than formerly, it has favoured a selection governed by pecuniary considerations. In the marriages which were formerly a matter of family arrangement, many other advantages, besides those of money, were taken into consideration. But in this case also, as in that of the marriage of near relations, it was less and less a clear-sighted solicitude to preserve noble blood, more and more an empty pride of birth, a narrow race-prejudice, that raised obstacles to marriage. It was thus necessary for love’s selection to conquer these obstructions, which in addition, even from the point of view of racial enhancement, were often of doubtful value. But all the more must we deplore the influence of money in determining matrimonial selection, above all when this influence makes itself felt at the cost of the inclination which love shows, in spite of everything, of making its choice by preference among equals; an inclination which—besides other easily explicable causes—