It would seem to be evident that individuals should be healthy and enabled to maintain themselves in the environment in which they are placed, but the qualities which may enable an individual successfully to adapt himself to factory life, or life in the crowds and strong competition of the city, may not be, and probably are not, qualities which are good for the race in general or for his immediate descendants.

At present our attempts to influence heredity should be limited to the heredity of disease only.

We can certainly say that intermarriage between persons who have tuberculosis or in whose families the disease has prevailed is disadvantageous for the offspring; the same holds true for insanity and for nervous diseases of all sorts, for forms of criminality, for alcoholism, and for those diseases which are long enduring and transmitted by sexual contact such as syphilis and gonorrhoea.

It is of importance that the facts bearing on the hereditary transmission of disease should become of general knowledge, in order that the dangers may be known and voluntarily avoided.

No measures of preventive medicine are successful which are not supported by a public educated to appreciate their importance, and the same holds true of eugenics.