ated with as much care as a delicate exotic.
'In regard to animals and plants,' says Sir George Campbell, 'we have
very largely mastered the principles of heredity and culture, and the
modes by which good qualities may be maximised, bad qualities
minimised.' True, so far as concerns a few points prized by ourselves
for our own purposes. But in doing this, we have so lowered the general
constitutional vigour of the plants or animals that our vines fall an
easy prey to oidium and phylloxera, our potatoes to the potato disease
and the Colorado beetle; our sheep are stupid, our rabbits idiotic, our
domestic breeds generally threatened with dangers to life and limb
unknown to their wiry ancestors in the wild state. And when one comes to
deal with the infinitely more complex individuality of man, what hope
would there be of our improving the breed by deliberate selection? If we
developed the intellect, we would probably stunt the physique or the
moral nature; if we aimed at a general culture of all faculties alike,
we would probably end by a Chinese uniformity of mediocre dead level.

The balance of organs and faculties in a race is a very delicate organic
equilibrium. How delicate we now know from thousands of examples, from
the correlations of seemingly unlike parts, from the wide-spread
effects of small conditions, from the utter dying out of races like the
Tasmanians or the Paraguay Indians under circumstances different from
those with which their ancestors were familiar. What folly to interfere
with a marvellous instinct which now preserves this balance intact, in
favour of an untried artificial system which would probably wreck it as
helplessly as the modern system of higher education for women is
wrecking the maternal powers of the best class in our English community!

Indeed, within the race itself, as it now exists, free choice, aided by
natural selection, is actually improving every good point, and is for
ever weeding out all the occasional failures and shortcomings of nature.
For weakly children, feeble children, stupid children, heavy children,
are undoubtedly born under this very regime of falling in love, whose
average results I believe to be so highly beneficial. How is this? Well,
one has to take into consideration two points in seeking for the
solution of that obvious problem.

In the first place, no instinct is absolutely perfect. All of them
necessarily fail at some points. If on the average they do good,