breed out as one is by defining points to breed for. Almost, I say, but
not quite. For here there does seem to be, if not certainties, at least
a few plausible probabilities that a vigorous and systematic criticism
may perhaps hammer into generalizations of sufficient certainty to go
upon.

I believe that long before humanity has hammered out the question of
what is pre-eminently desirable in inheritance, a certain number of
things will have been isolated and defined as pre-eminently
undesirable. But before these are considered, let us sweep out of our
present regard a number of cruel and mischievous ideas that are
altogether too ascendant at the present time.

Anthropology has been compared to a great region, marked out indeed as
within the sphere of influence of science, but unsettled and for the
most part unsubdued. Like all such hinterland sciences, it is a happy
hunting-ground for adventurers. Just as in the early days of British
Somaliland, rascals would descend from nowhere in particular upon
unfortunate villages, levy taxes and administer atrocity in the name of
the Empire, and even, I am told, outface for a time the modest heralds
of the government, so in this department of anthropology the public
mind suffers from the imposition of theories and assertions claiming to
be "scientific," which have no more relation to that organized system
of criticism which is science, than a brigand at large on a mountain
has to the machinery of law and police, by which finally he will be
hanged. Among such raiding theorists none at present are in quite such
urgent need of polemical suppression as those who would persuade the
heedless general reader that every social failure is necessarily a
"degenerate," and who claim boldly that they can trace a distinctly
evil and mischievous strain in that unfortunate miscellany which