We cannot describe or even enumerate the wrecks of the many plans for race improvement that are strewn from Plato to our day. Sporadic, emotional, visionary, often it must be confessed suggested by possibilities of material gain to the "leader"--they have all passed. They failed because they were unscientific; because there was available no solid foundation of determined fact upon which to build. One need suggest only the Oneida Community, as it was originally planned, or the Parisian society of _L'Elite_--in both of which the selection of mates was to be carefully controlled--or some of the fantasies of Bernard Shaw, to indicate the character of these failures. Only recently have we become able to suggest the possibility of race improvement by scientific methods, and only very recently has the possibility appeared in the light of a necessity, the alternative being the universal reward of the unsuccessful. The present eugenic movement may be said to date from 1865 when Francis Galton showed that mental qualities are inherited just as are physical qualities, and pointed out that this opened the way to an improvement of the race in all respects. The data in support of this pregnant conclusion were included in Galton's work on "Hereditary Genius" published in 1869, when he again emphasized definitely the possibility and desirability of improving the natural qualities of the human race. His suggestions fell upon the stony ground of ignorance even of the most elementary facts of heredity. The subject was raised again in his "Inquiries into the Human Faculty" in 1883, and the word "Eugenics" was then coined. The ground was still non-receptive. Then followed a period of rapid increase in our knowledge of heredity in animals and plants and in 1901 Galton returned again to the subject, this time in a more direct and elaborate way, and his Huxley Lecture of that year before the Anthropological Institute was upon "The Possible Improvement of the Human Breed under the Existing Conditions of Law and Sentiment." This time he received a real hearing, partly on account of recent disclosures regarding the state of human society and its trends in Great Britain, chiefly because there was at last a real scientific basis for such a proposal. In this lecture, after declaring that the possibility of human race culture is no longer to be considered an academical or impractical problem, Galton proceeded to show that we have a sufficient biological knowledge of man to furnish a working basis. We know of man's variability and heredity--that some men are worth more than others in the community, and that individual traits are also family possessions. This he followed up with definite suggestions as to possible means of the "augmentation of favored stock."