all the agencies by which
the human race may be improved, and the effort to give practical effect
to those agencies by conscious and deliberate action in favour of better
breeding. Even among savages eugenics may be said to exist, if only in
the crude and unscientific practice of destroying feeble, deformed, and
abnormal infants at birth. In civilized ages elaborate and more or less
scientific attempts are made by breeders of animals to improve the
stocks they breed, and their efforts have been crowned with much
success. The study of the same methods in their bearing on man proceeded
out of the Darwinian school of biology, and is especially associated
with the great name of Sir Francis Galton, the cousin of Darwin. Galton
first proposed to call this study "Stirpiculture." Under that name it
inspired Noyes, the founder of the Oneida Community, with the impulse to
carry it into practice with a thoroughness and daring--indeed a
similarity of method--which caused Oneida almost to rival the City of
the Sun. But the scheme of Noyes, excellent as in some respects it was
as an experiment, outran both scientific knowledge and the spirit of the
times. It was not countenanced by Galton, who never had any wish to
offend general sentiment, but sought to win it over to his side, and
before 1880 the Oneida Community was brought to an end in consequence of
the antagonism it aroused. Galton continued to develop his conceptions
slowly and cautiously, and in 1883, in his _Inquiries into Human
Faculty_, he abandoned the term "Stirpiculture" and devised the term
"Eugenics," which is now generally adopted to signify Good Breeding.

Galton was quite well aware that the improved breeding of men is a very
different matter from the improved breeding of animals, requiring a
different knowledge and a different method, so that the ridicule which
has sometimes been ignorantly flung at Eugenics failed to touch him. It
would be clearly undesirable to breed men, as animals are bred, for
single points at the sacrifice of other points, even if we were in a
position to breed men from outside. Human breeding must proceed from
impulses that arise, voluntarily, in human brains and wills, and are
carried out with a human sense of personal responsibility. Galton
believed that the first need was the need of knowledge in these matters.
He was not anxious to invoke legislation.[24] The compulsory presentation
of certificates of health and good breeding as a preli