The immediate need of this age, as of all ages, is perhaps not so much the birth of babies capable of developing into men and women of genius, as the full exploitation of the possibilities of genius with which, as I fancy, every generation on the average is about as well endowed as any other. There is, of course, the popular doctrine that there are no mute inglorious Miltons, that “genius will out,” and that therefore if it does not appear, it is not there to appear. In expressing the compelling power of genius in many cases, this doctrine is not without truth. Yet history abounds in instances where genius has been destroyed by environment--and we can only guess how many more instances there are of which history has no record. To take the single case of musical genius, it is a lamentable thought that there may be those now living whose natural endowments, in a favourable environment, would have enabled them to write symphonies fit to place beside Beethoven's, but whom some environmental factors--conventional, economic, educational, or what not--have silenced; or worse, have persuaded to write such sterile nullities as need not here be instanced. There is surely no waste in all this wasteful world so lamentable as this waste of genius. If, then, anyone could devise for us a means by which the genius, potentially existing at any time, were realised, he would have performed in effect a service equivalent to that of which eugenics repudiates the present possibility--the actual creation of genius. But if we consider what the conditions are which cause the waste of genius, we realise at once that they mainly inhere in the level of the human environment of the priceless potentiality in question. As we noted elsewhere, in an age like that of Pericles genius springs up on all hands. It is encouraged and welcomed because the average level of the human environment in which it finds itself is so high. But if eugenics can raise the average level of intelligence, in so doing not merely does it render more likely, as Mr. Galton points out, the production of men of the highest ability, but it provides those conditions in which men of genius, now swamped, can swim. We could not undertake to produce a Shakespeare, but we might reasonably hope to produce a generation which would not damage or destroy its Shakespeares. And even if men of genius still found it necessary, as men of genius have found it necessary, to “play to the gallery,” they would play, as Mr. Galton says of the demagogue in a eugenic age, “to a more sensible gallery than at present.” Darwin somewhere points out that it is not the scientific, but the unscientific man who denies future possibilities. Thus though an advocate of eugenics may be applauded for his judgment if he declares that the creation of genius will for ever be impossible, yet I should not care to assert that the ultimate limitations of eugenics can thus be defined. We have yet to hear the last of Mendelism.