The eugenic prospect : national and racial / by C.W. Saleeby.

  • Saleeby, C. W. (Caleb Williams), 1878-1940.
Date:
[1921]
Catalogue details

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

Credit: The eugenic prospect : national and racial / by C.W. Saleeby. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    INTRODUCTION In London, on May 14, 1904, our newly-formed Sociological Society was publicly inaugurated by an address on ** National Eugenics, from the veteran Francis Galton. Before he had finished I had abandoned all idea of medical practice in order to follow him. Seven¬ teen years have passed. In the interval I have always adhered to Galton*s original definition of eugenics, which he gave us on that day, and in which he explicitly in¬ cluded, not only heredity, but all the influences which affect the development of hereditary potentialities. In other words, he recognised nurture,*' as well as ** nature.*'* His followers, however, have for the most part steadily decried nurture and have even sought formally to exclude nurture, including ante-natal nurture, frorii eugenics; and it has been a persistent struggle against heavy odds to insist that our founder was right ; to gain recognition for my correlative concepts of racial poisons and preventive eugenics, through which the whole antithesis between nature and nurture begins to lose its meaning; and, in recent years, to direct the attention of eugenists to the findings of experimental biology, which have resulted in the triumph of neo- Lamarckianism,*' so-called, in that they have established * This antithesis Galton took from Prospero's description of Caliban : A devil, a born devil, on whose nature Nurture will never stick.*' The T$mpe$t, Act IV., Scene