EUGENICS
SIR,—Will you forgive an admirer from expressing his feeling that your notes on Eugenics in The Spectator of December 17th have not quite the classical approach to knowledge that we have grown to expect? Biometry is at least as much a science as ballistics ; yet if a lecturer stated that the effective beaten zone of a certain weapon was so great, I suggest that you would not comment by asking how was a yard measured and were there never any shots outside this zone? I do not know if you consider this a fair comparison.
I do not belong to the Eugenics Society myself--at least so far—as genetics is my hobby and they are inclined to compromise so much in dealing with humans that the basic principles are inclined to be lost. But I do believe that those principles are the most important things in the world and the knowledge and use of them can do more good to the human race than any amount of legislation to try to remedy their neglect.
One need go into the higher mathematics the science uses to take a simple case like this. France, England and near countries suffer admittedly from a lack of children. Our magazine cover and other popular artists draw the willowy type of woman. Anyone who has spent their life refusing, even at a gift, a brood mare, bitch, ewe or cow which is weedy because they know the trouble they will have foaling, &c., them, are not surprised that the vogue set by the. pictures should have that result. I hope you will forgive my approaching you, but as I said, I regard the subject as of such vital importance ; and hold Gregor Mendel to be the world's greatest man, for he discovered the only known fact of the science potentially most useful to man.—Yours, &c.,
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