im. All that he is, and can be, is its creation;
all that he can do is the result of its laboriously accumulated
traditions. It is only by working towards the creation of a still better
posterity, that he can repay the good gifts which the human race has
brought him.[426] Just as, within the limits of this present life, many
who have received benefits and kindnesses they can never repay to the
actual givers, find a pleasure in vicariously repaying the like to
others, so the heritage we have received from our ascendents we can never
repay, save by handing it on in a better form to our descendants.

It is undoubtedly true that the growth of eugenical ideals has not been,
for the most part, due to religious feeling. It has been chiefly the
outcome of a very gradual, but very comprehensive, movement towards social
amelioration, which has been going on for more than a century, and which
has involved a progressive effort towards the betterment of all the
conditions of life. The ideals of this movement were proclaimed in the
eighteenth century, they began to find expression early in the nineteenth
century, in the initiation of the modern system of sanitation, in the
growth of factory legislation, in all the movements which have been borne
onwards by socialism hand in hand with individualism. The inevitable
tendency has been slowly towards the root of the matter; it began to be
seen that comparatively little can be effected by improving the conditions
of life of adults; attention began to be concentrated on the child, on the
infant, on the embryo in its mother's womb, and this resulted in the
fruitful movement of puericulture inspired by Pinard, and finally the
problem is brought to its source at the point of procreation, and the
regulation of sexual selection between stocks and between individuals as
the prime condition of life. Here we have the science of eugenics which
Sir Francis Galton has done so much to make a definite, vital, and
practical study, and which in its wider bearings he defines as "the
science which deals with those social eugenics that influence, mentally or
physically, the racial qualities of future generations." In its largest
aspect, eugenics is, as Galton has elsewhere said, man's attempt "to
replace Natural Selection by other processes that are more merciful and
not less effective."

In the last chapter of his _Memories of My Life_ (1908), on "Race
Improvement," Sir Francis Galton sets forth the