"perfect health" in one human being is the same as the similarly named
condition in another, than we are that the beauty of one type is made
up of the same essential elements as the beauty of another. Health is a
balance, a balance of blood against nerve, of digestion against
secretion, of heart against brain. A heart of perfect health and vigour
put into the body of a perfectly healthy man who is built upon a
slighter scale than that heart, will swiftly disorganize the entire
fabric, and burst its way to a haemorrhage in lung perhaps, or brain,
or wherever the slightest relative weakening permits. The "perfect"
health of a negro may be a quite dissimilar system of reactions to the
"perfect health" of a vigorous white; you may blend them only to create
an ailing mass of physiological discords. "Health," just as much as
these other things, is, for this purpose of marriage diplomas and the
like, a vague, unserviceable synthetic quality. It serves each one of
us for our private and conversational needs, but in this question it is
not hard enough and sharp--enough for the thing we want it to do.
Brought to the service of this fine and complicated issue it breaks
down altogether. We do not know enough. We have not analyzed enough nor
penetrated enough. There is no science yet, worthy of the name, in any
of these things. [Footnote: This idea of attempting to define the
elements in inheritance, although it is absent from much contemporary
discussion, was pretty evidently in mind in the very striking
researches of the Abbe Mendel to which Mr. Bateson--with a certain
intemperance of manner--has recently called attention. (Bateson,
_Mendel's Principles of Heredity_, Cambridge University Press,
1902.)]

These considerations should at least suffice to demonstrate the entire
impracticability of Mr. Galton's two suggestions. Moreover, this idea
of picking out high-scale individuals in any particular quality or