les of
eugenics to the purely biological standpoint of the breeder of plants
and animals. Let me illustrate by some concrete facts from eugenics:

There is a widespread opinion among science teachers that high-school
biology should present some of the best established facts of heredity;
and that these should be eugenically applied to human life by means of
such illustrations as those afforded by the histories of certain
degenerate families, such as the well-known Jukes and Kallikaks. A
brief sketch of the history of the latter family, as described in Dr.
Goddard's interesting book, "The Kallikak Family" (Macmillan), will
make clear my point as to the ethical appeal of eugenics.

[Sidenote: Eugenics and ethical teaching.]

A young man of good ancestry broke the moral law about one hundred and
forty years ago and became the father of an illegitimate son by a
feeble-minded mother. Of 480 descendants of this son, there have been
46 normal, many immoral, many alcoholic and 143 feeble-minded. The same
man who back in the revolutionary days made a moral mistake which led
to such awful consequences, later married a woman of good family and
became the progenitor of a second line of 496 descendants of whom 494
have been normal mentally, while two were affected by alliance with
another family; and all have been first-class citizens, many of them
prominent in business, professions, etc.

Even making due allowance for the depressing influence of the
environment in which most of the down-and-out descendants in the
degenerate line lived, the comparison between the normal and the
abnormal lines from the same ancestor gives the most convincing eugenic
evidence that has been discovered in the human race. Doubtless it will
long be used as a basis for attempted biological control of the
propagation of the unfit. Many similar cases of hereditary degeneracy
are recorded in books on eugenics.

Such a eugenic record as that of this Kallikak family should be
reviewed in every high school and college in connection with the topic
"heredity" in a course of biology, for it will teach two important
lessons: (1) The biological principle that defects, both physical and
mental, are highly heritable, even for many generations; and (2) the
ethical responsibility for the sex actions of the individual who may
start a long train of human disaster that may visit the children unto
even later than the third and fourth generations. The first lesson is a
p