xpressed his surprise that, considering
all the precautions taken, for example, in the breeding of horses,
none whatever are taken in the breeding of the human species. It seems
to be forgotten that the species suffers when the "fittest" are not
able to perpetuate their type. Ritchie, in his _Darwinism and
Politics_[248] reminds us of Darwin's remark that the institution of
the peerage might be defended on the ground that peers, owing to the
prestige they enjoy, are enabled to select as wives "the most
beautiful and charming women out of the lower ranks."[249] But, says
Galton, it is as often as not "heiresses" that they pick out, and
birth statistics seem to show that these are either less robust or
less fecund than others. The truth is that considerations continue to
preside over marriage which are entirely foreign to the improvement of
type, much as this is a condition of general progress. Hence the
importance of completing Odin's and De Candolle's statistics which are
designed to show how characters are incorporated in organisms, how
they are transmitted, how lost, and according to what law eugenic,
elements depart from the mean or return to it.

But thinkers do not always content themselves with undertaking merely
the minute researches which the idea of Selection suggests. They are
eager to defend this or that thesis. In the name of this idea certain
social anthropologists have recast the conception of the process of
civilisation, and have affirmed that Social Selection generally works
against the trend of Natural Selection. Vacher de Lapouge--following
up an observation by Broca on the point--enumerates the various
institutions, or customs, such as the celibacy of priests and military
conscription, which cause elimination or sterilisation of the bearers
of certain superior qualities, intellectual or physical. In a more
general way he attacks the democratic movement, a movement, as P.
Bourget says, which is "anti-physical" and contrary to the natural
laws of progress; though it has been inspired "by the dreams of that
most visionary of all centuries, the eighteenth."[250] The "Equality"
which levels down and mixes (justly condemned, he holds, by the Comte
de Gobineau), prevents the aristocracy of the blond dolichocephales
from holding the position and playing the part which, in the interests
of all, should belong to them. Otto Ammon, in his _Natural Selection
in Man_, and in _The Social Order and its Natural Bases_