Assuming that these 1,700,000 men are a fair sample of the entire population of 100,000,000 (and Stoddart says there is every reason to believe that it is a fair sample), this means that the average mental age of Americans is only about fourteen; that 45,000,000, or nearly one-half of the whole population, will never develop mental capacity beyond the stage represented by a normal twelve-year-old child; that only 13,500,000 will ever show superior intelligence; and that only 4,500,000 can be considered "talented." "Still more alarming," the author continues, "is the prospect of the future. The overwhelming weight of evidence indicates that the A and B elements in America are barely reproducing themselves, while the other elements are increasing at rates proportionate to their decreasing intellectual capacity; in other words, that intelligence is to-day being steadily bred out of the American population." The biologist Davenport calculated that at present rates of reproduction 1,000 Harvard graduates of to-day would have only fifty descendants two centuries hence, whereas 1,000 Roumanians to-day in Boston, at their present rate of breeding, would have 100,000 descendants in the same space of time. Mr. Lothrop Stoddart emphatically scouts the view which is occasionally put forward to the effect that genius is a form of insanity, and that therefore one ought to be careful about discouraging the marriage even of epileptics and mentally unbalanced persons for fear a possible Napoleon or Julius Caesar or Beethoven should be lost to the world. "Careful scientific investigation," he says, "has clearly disproved this notion. For one thing, elaborate statistical studies of eminent persons have shown them to be less liable to insanity than the general population. Of course, a considerable number of eminent men can be listed who unquestionably suffered from various neuropathic traits. But it was not those traits that made them eminent; on the contrary, these were handicaps. Somewhere back in their ancestry a taint was introduced into a sound superior strain, and produced this disharmonic combination of qualities." SECTION 2.--HEREDITY _V._ ENVIRONMENT. The Committee feel bound to refer to the great strides made during the last half-century towards establishing laws and theories of genetics and heredity. Unfortunately, terms such as the "integrity of the germ plasm" and "the Mendelian law," while marking great advances in biological thought and science, have become too much associated in the public mind with a depressing and fatalistic notion that heredity determines everything and that environment can play but a very insignificant part in human evolution, development, and progress--physical, mental, or moral. Such, of course, is not the case.