your house.")


LETTER 418. TO G.A. GASKELL.
Down, November 15th, 1878.

(418/1. This letter has been published in Clapperton's "Scientific
Meliorism," 1885, page 340, together with Mr. Gaskell's letter of November
13th (page 337). Mr. Gaskell's laws are given in his letter of November
13th, 1878. They are:--

I. The Organological Law:
Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest.

II. The Sociological Law:
Sympathetic Selection, or Indiscriminate Survival.

III. The Moral Law:
Social Selection, or the Birth of the Fittest.)

Your letter seems to me very interesting and clearly expressed, and I hope
that you are in the right. Your second law appears to be largely acted on
in all civilised countries, and I just alluded to it in my remarks to the
effect (as far as I remember) that the evil which would follow by checking
benevolence and sympathy in not fostering the weak and diseased would be
greater than by allowing them to survive and then to procreate.

With regard to your third law, I do not know whether you have read an
article (I forget when published) by F. Galton, in which he proposes
certificates of health, etc., for marriage, and that the best should be