Especial importance may be attached to those investigations in animal psychology which trace the inheritance of individual characteristics. The laboratory psychologist studies, for instance, the laws according to which qualities like savageness and tameness are distributed in the succeeding generations. He studies the proportions of those traits in hundreds of mice, which are especially fit for the experiment on account of their quick multiplication. But this may lead immediately to important results for the farmers with reference to mental traits in breeding animals. It would be misleading if it were denied that all this is a programme to-day and not a realization, a promise and not a fulfilment. The field is practically still uncultivated. But in a time in which the nation is anxious to economize the national resources, which were too long wasted, and in which the need of helping the farmer and of intensifying the values of rural life is felt so generally, it would be reckless to ignore a promise the fulfilment of which seems so near. To be sure, the farmers cultivated their fields through thousands of years without chemistry, just as they do their daily work to-day without psychology, but nobody doubts that the introduction of scientific chemistry into farming has brought the most valuable help to the national, and to the world economy. The time seems really ripe for experimental psychology to play the same rôle for the benefit of mankind, which in the future as in the past will always be prosperous only when the farmer succeeds. VII SOCIAL SINS IN ADVERTISING There is one industry in the world which may be called, more than any other, a socializing factor in our modern life. The industry of advertising binds men together and tightly knits the members of society into one compact mass. Every one in the big market-place of civilization has his demands and has some supply. But in order to link supply and demand, the offering must be known. The industry which overcomes the isolation of man with his wishes and with his wares lays the real foundation of the social structure. It is not surprising that it has taken gigantic dimensions and that uncounted millions are turning the wheels of the advertising factory. The influence and civilizing power of the means of propaganda go far beyond the help in the direct exchange of goods. The advertiser makes the modern newspaper and magazine possible. These mightiest agencies of public opinion and intellectual culture are supported, and their technical perfection secured, by those who pay their business tax in the form of advertisements.