o bring
reason and intelligence to bear upon HEREDITY. But Galton, in spite
of the immense value of this approach and his great stimulation to
criticism, was completely unable to formulate a definite and practical
working program. He hoped at length to introduce Eugenics "into the
national conscience like a new religion.... I see no impossibility in
Eugenics becoming a religious dogma among mankind, but its details must
first be worked out sedulously in the study. Over-zeal leading to hasty
action, would do harm by holding out expectations of a new golden
age, which will certainly be falsified and cause the science to
be discredited. The first and main point is to secure the general
intellectual acceptance of Eugenics as a hopeful and most important
study. Then, let its principles work into the heart of the nation, who
will gradually give practical effect to them in ways that we may not
wholly foresee."(1)

Galton formulated a general law of inheritance which declared that an
individual receives one-half of his inheritance from his two
parents, one-fourth from his four grandparents, one-eighth from his
great-grandparents, one-sixteenth from his great-great grandparents, and
so on by diminishing fractions to his primordial ancestors, the sum
of all these fractions added together contributing to the whole of the
inherited make-up. The trouble with this generalization, from the modern
Mendelian point of view, is that it fails to define what "characters"
one would get in the one-half that came from one's parents, or the
one-fourth from one's grandparents. The whole of our inheritance is
not composed of these indefinitely made up fractional parts. We are
interested rather in those more specific traits or characters, mental
or physical, which, in the Mendelian view, are structural and functional
units, making up a mosaic rather than a blend. The laws of heredity are
concerned with the precise behavior, during a series of generations, of
these specific unit characters. This behavior, as the study of Genetics
shows, may be determined in lesser organisms by experiment. Once
determined, they are subject to prophecy.

The problem of human heredity is now seen to be infinitely more complex
than imagined by Galton and his followers, and the optimistic hope of
elevating Eugenics to the level of a religion is a futile one. Most of
the Eugenists, including Professor Karl Pearson and his colleagues of
the Eugenics Laboratory of the Un