=Eugenics.=--When Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin and one of the first to apply to human beings the ideas of "selection for better breeds," published in 1873 his article on "Hereditary Improvement," he used the word "Stirpiculture" as indicating the application of evolution to the method of improving mankind by the selection of the superior in the process of reproduction. He later changed the designation to "Eugenics," which is now held as the term best applying in this connection. In 1891 Dr. Lester Ward himself said, "Artificial selection has given to man the most that he enjoys in the organic products of earth. May not men and women be selected as well as sheep and horses? From the great stirp of humanity with all its multiplied ancestral plasms--some very poor, some mediocre, some merely indifferent, a goodly number ranging from middling to fair, only a comparatively few very good, with an occasional crystal of the first water--why may we not learn to select on some broad and comprehensive plan with a view to a general building up and rounding out of the race of human beings?" So keen an observer and philosophic thinker as Doctor Ward, however, could not long accept the first allurement of this idea. He soon began to show with his convincing power that "the control of heredity is possible only to a master creature. Man is the master creature of the animal world. Society is the master of its defectives. But normal people are their own masters. Any attempt on the part of society to control the choice of partners in the marital relation would be tyranny." Recognizing the need for "negative eugenics" fully, and declaring in its name that "mental and physical defectives of society should be kept from perpetuating their defects through propagation," he insisted that "eugenists must recognize and admit the enormous force of personal preference" in marriage.