collected.

Those who care to initiate and carry on a family chronicle
illustrated by abundant photographic portraiture, will produce a
work that they and their children and their descendants in more
remote generations will assuredly be grateful for. The family tie
has a real as well as a traditional significance. The world is
beginning to awaken to the fact that the life of the individual is
in some real sense a prolongation of those of his ancestry. His
vigour, his character, and his diseases are principally derived from
theirs; sometimes his faculties are blends of ancestral qualities;
but more frequently they are mosaics, patches of resemblance to one
or other of them showing now here and now there. The life-histories
of our relatives are prophetic of our own futures; they are far more
instructive to us than those of strangers, far more fitted to
encourage and to forewarn us. If there be such a thing as a natural
birthright, I can conceive of none superior to the right of the
child to be informed, at first by proxy through his guardians, and
afterwards personally, of the life-history, medical and other, of
his ancestry. The child is thrust into existence without his having
any voice at all in the matter, and the smallest amend that those
who brought him here can make, is to furnish him with all the
guidance they can, including the complete life-histories of his near
progenitors.

The investigation of human eugenics--that is, of the conditions
under which men of a high type are produced--is at present extremely
hampered by the want of full family histories, both medical and
general, extending over three or four generations. There is no such
difficulty in investigating animal eugenics, because the generations