en
of Science_; various kinds of pathological families have since been
investigated by Karl Pearson and his co-workers (see the series of
_Biometrika_); the pedigrees of the defective classes (especially the
feeble-minded and epileptic) are now being accurately worked out, as by
Godden, at Vineland, New Jersey, and Davenport, in New York (see e.g.
_Eugenics Review_, April, 1911, and _Journal of Nervous and Mental
Disease_, November, 1911).

[150] "When once more the importance of good birth comes to be recognized
in a new sense," wrote W.C.D. Whetham and Mrs. Whetham (in _The Family
and the Nation_, p. 222), "when the innate physical and mental qualities
of different families are recorded in the central sociological
department or scientifically reformed College of Arms, the pedigrees of
all will be known to be of supreme interest. It would be understood to
be more important to marry into a family with a good hereditary record
of physical and mental and moral qualities than it ever has been
considered to be allied to one with sixteen quarterings."

[151] The importance of such biographical records of aptitude and
character are so great that some, like Schallmayer (_Vererbung und
Auslese_, 2nd ed., 1910, p. 389) believe that they must be made
universally obligatory. This proposal, however, seems premature.

[152] In many undesigned and unforeseen ways these registers may be of
immense value. They may even prove the means of overthrowing our
pernicious and destructive system of so-called "education." A step in
this direction has been suggested by Mr. R.T. Bodey, Inspector of
Elementary Schools, at a meeting of the Liverpool branch of the Eugenics
Education Society: "Education facilities should be carefully distributed
with regard to the scientific likelihood of their utilization to the
maximum of national advantage, and this not for economic reasons only,
but because it was cruel to drag children from their own to a different
sphere of life, and cruel to the class they deserted. Since the
activities of the nation and the powers of the children were alike
varied in kind and degree, the most natural plan would be to sort them
both out, and then design a school system expressly in order to fit one
to the other. At present there was no fixed purpose, but a perpetual
riot of changes, resulting in distraction of mind, discontinuity of
purpose, and increase of cost, while happiness decayed because desires
grew faster than poss