It is in the same way that the human population of country villages, most sad to see, is every year rendered less intelligent than it was a hundred years ago. All the enterprising, intelligent young men and maidens are “fished” away, drawn by baits and hooks to the great towns; only the dull and relatively incapable are left in the village to marry and produce a new generation. The village population necessarily becomes made up of a dull stock—incapable, as appears from official reports, of being educated beyond a very low stage. In some districts 70 per cent. of the children are thus unintelligent, though not unhealthy or imbecile. It is possible that the want of home-training and example in very early childhood is to some extent a cause of the dullness of village children. And so it goes on, generation after generation, as facilities for leaving the village increase and inducements to stay or return decrease. The 30 per cent. of the new generation who have any “wits” leave the village, never to return. And no one re-stocks the village. That must be taken in hand soon. XXIX THE FEEBLE-MINDED A considerable proportion of the young which are produced as a new generation of either plants or animals are not merely unlike their parents in some small particulars of colour, proportion, activity, and so on, but are, as compared with the normal or usual standard of the species, “defective”; that is to say, they are wanting in some organ or part, as though maimed, or by some cause restricted or reduced in regard to that part. This occurs in human beings, and in domesticated animals more obviously than in wild animals and plants, for two reasons: firstly, because in wild conditions the defective young die off very early in the struggle for existence and so escape human observation; whereas man protects his own “defective” young, and often, also, those of domesticated animals, so that they are allowed to “grow up” more or less; secondly, such defective structure appearing at birth, and therefore called “congenital,” is carried on by heredity, more or less completely, should the defective animal or plant be allowed to breed. Such breeding of defective individuals is prevented in wild nature by their early destruction; their defects cause their early death by unfitting them for the competition and struggle which are in natural conditions rigidly severe. Only a few survive among the many thousands of each species born into conditions of limited food and space—conditions which are not sufficient to support more than a very small number so as to enable them to reach the adult or breeding stage of life. But man, on the contrary, protects his own young, and often those of his domesticated animals and plants, from this destructive competition, and thus allows those which are to a certain extent defective to breed.