ted in organisms, how they are transmitted, how lost, and
according to what law eugenic elements depart from the mean or return to
it.

But thinkers do not always content themselves with undertaking merely
the minute researches which the idea of Selection suggests. They are
eager to defend this or that thesis. In the name of this idea certain
social anthropologists have recast the conception of the process of
civilisation, and have affirmed that Social Selection generally works
against the trend of Natural Selection. Vacher de Lapouge--following
up an observation by Broca on the point--enumerates the various
institutions, or customs, such as the celibacy of priests and military
conscription, which cause elimination or sterilisation of the bearers of
certain superior qualities, intellectual or physical. In a more general
way he attacks the democratic movement, a movement, as P. Bourget says,
which is "anti-physical" and contrary to the natural laws of progress;
though it has been inspired "by the dreams of that most visionary of all
centuries, the eighteenth." (V. de Lapouge, "Les Selections sociales",
page 259, Paris, 1896.) The "Equality" which levels down and mixes
(justly condemned, he holds, by the Comte de Gobineau), prevents the
aristocracy of the blond dolichocephales from holding the position and
playing the part which, in the interests of all, should belong to them.
Otto Ammon, in his "Natural Selection in Man", and in "The Social Order
and its Natural Bases" ("Die naturliche Auslese beim Menschen", Jena,
1893; "Die Gesellschaftsordnung und ihre naturlichen Grundlagen".
"Entwurf einer Sozialanthropologie", Jena, 1896.), defended analogous
doctrines in Germany; setting the curve representing frequency of talent
over against that of income, he attempted to show that all democratic
measures which aim at promoting the rise in the social scale of the
talented are useless, if not dangerous; that they only increase the
panmixia, to the great detriment of the species and of society.

Among the aristocratic theories which Darwinism has thus inspired
we must reckon that of Nietzsche. It is well known that in order to
complete his philosophy he added biological studies to his philological;
and more than once in his remarks upon the "Wille zur Macht" he
definitely alludes to Darwin; though it must be confessed that it is
generally in order to proclaim the in sufficiency of the processes by
which Darwin seeks to explain th