As judge he was called on to preside at the trial of a man accused of murder. The evidence of guilt was conclusive, conviction speedy. It became his duty to don the black cap and pronounce sentence of death. But before he did this, he was struck with something familiar in the prisoner’s sodden, passion-marked features, made inquiry concerning his early history, and, to his mingled horror and amazement, learned that the wretched man was none other than the happy, buoyant lad who had first felt the heavy hand of the law on account of the orchard-robbing episode in which the judge, now about to doom him to the scaffold, had gone scot-free. Than this strange chapter in human experience I can at the moment recall nothing that more strikingly suggests and illustrates the dominant theory in modern scientific thought regarding the offender against society. The implication that the contrasting careers of the two boys were largely determined by circumstances over which they had no control, and that it was the brutalising jail experience of the one and the more fortunate upbringing of the other that chiefly accounted for their diverse fates, unquestionably represents the views held by the great majority of present-day students of delinquency and crime. To be sure, there are not a few who would raise the question, “Might not the boy who was caught in the orchard have ‘gone wrong’ in any event, because of inborn defects?” These are the enthusiasts conspicuous to-day as leaders of the so-called eugenics movement looking to the improvement of mankind on stock-breeding principles—by sterilisation of the “unfit,” stricter marriage laws, etc. Nor can it be denied that they have on their side a formidable array of facts which would seem to demonstrate the unescapable fatality of a bad heredity. On the other hand it is equally certain that there is a steadily growing body of evidence giving ever greater support to the opposite view—to the view, namely, that after all the influence of heredity is of quite secondary importance to that of environment in the marring or making of a human life. Even the facts emphasised by the eugenists themselves sometimes tend, on close examination, to bear out the belief that it is in the surroundings and training of a child rather than in his heredity that the sources of his ultimate goodness or badness are mainly to be found. The history of the notorious Juke family, featured by almost every modern advocate of the “fatal heredity” theory, is a case in point.