Eugenics / by Edgar Schuster.

  • Schuster, Edgar.
Date:
[1912]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Eugenics / by Edgar Schuster. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    EUGENICS 15 views, it expresses roughly the older ideas on the subject and the popular opinion of the present day. Undoubtedly heredity mani¬ fests itself in the apparent transmission of characters or qualities of parents to their children, and, in consequence, two questions or groups of questions are raised. In the first place, to what extent and in what manner does this transmission occur, and what kind of characters or qualities are transmitted; secondly, by what mechanism is the transmission brought about. Heredity is placed first among the con¬ stituent parts of the science of Eugenics because, more than any other agency, it moulds the racial characters of future genera¬ tions, About this there can be no dispute. Without heredity, reproduction would be inconceivable, since the very term reproduc¬ tion implies that like produces like; and without reproduction there w^uld not be any future generations of mankind. This may appear to be a fallacy, but it is not in reality. The appearance is due to the fact that the word heredity has been used in a different and truer sense to that with which we are most familiar. The qualities which strike our attention as being inherited are those which are not common attributes of the race, species, or variety, but are peculi¬ arities shown both by the apparent trans¬ mitter and the inheritor. Thus, when one