some extent select our partners in life; and while falling in love, or rather rising, is a very subtle thing, not to be standardised, there cannot be any harm in having the mind pre-occupied and the heart garrisoned with ideals of health in the widest and highest sense.

There should be, perhaps there is, a growing prejudice against radically unsound people having children, and against spoiling good seed with bad--by the introduction, for instance, of defects like deaf-mutism, pre-dispositions to well-defined mental instability, certain forms of diabetes and epilepsy, and uncured venereal disease. The time is not ripe for marriage-certificates or parentagepermits; and it is a little suspicious that it is always the other fellow, not oneself, that one thinks of as not a good sort of a person to be a parent. The time is not ripe, if it ever will be, for allowing weakly infants, whose continued life must be more or less miserable, to pass away in their sleep. The serious objections are that many weakly infants, such as Sir Isaac Newton, have grown up to be the makers and shakers of the world, that the Spartan proposals outrun our present secure knowledge, that lopping off twigs may be removing the results of evil without touching the cause, and that we cannot go far in social surgery without outraging social sentiment in its finest expressions and shaking the foundations of our ethical system. It might be thought that lopping off or elimination is just what biologists would approve of, but there are many who see much more hope in fostering pride of race and the oldfashioned hope of having a vigorous family. There is much to do positively in welcoming and encouraging new buds of promise-those variations which are the raw materials of evolution-before we put our hands to the pruning knife. In any case, Herod's methods are not practical politics to-day.

In connexion with Eugenics we must say a little in regard to Birth Control-more or less artificial ways of preventing conception, of keeping a new life from beginning. Let us suppose that this is possible without detriment to the bodily health of the parents, a question for the medical expert. Let us also brush aside the objection that birth control is 'artificial,' for the life of civilised society is interpenetrated with the artificial.

What are the chief objections to deliberate contraception? Dean Fremantle says that rather than artificial restriction he would see continued the struggles of parents with large families, from which he says, 'a large part of the moral greatness of our people has resulted.' We doubt very much this theory that the moral fibre was engendered by this struggle; and against the achievements of those who succeed have to be weighed the misery and hopelessness to which many noble women have been reduced by too rapid succession of births. Dean Inge thinks that high-minded married people should avoid preventives except as a last resource in the failure of self-restraint. It will be disastrous indeed if we settle down into materialistic or farmyard views of marriage and having children, or if we imagine that we can substitute mechanical for moral control without serious loss, but it is foolish to expect the supernatural from ordinary mankind. It is well known that great restraint and great conjugal temperance may soon be followed by too many babies-too many for their health and the mother's too.

Prof. Pembrey, a distinguished physiologist, regards birth control as a degenerate evasion of a virile struggle for existence, but suggests that it may be a blessing in disguise by assisting in the elimination of the types who practise it, types in whom physiological processes are inadequately balanced.' But it appears to us that it will be very difficult to prove the lack of balance in most of those who practise birth control. They have had as many children as they can hope to care for well; they have had as many children as the mother's health, in the widest sense, will stand.

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In fairness, however, we wish to quote a paragraph from Prof. Pembrey, for the difficulty of the problem must be admitted. We would preface what he says with the note that those who advocate methods of birth control,' because they see no other way out, are not advocating more than a restriction of parentage. Prof. Pembrey writes:

"The modern crusade of "birth control," supported though it be by some biologists, is not based on biological principles or the theory of evolution. It involves the view that the environment is more potent than the stock; it ignores the

value of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fit. It is no evidence of self-control, sacrifice, and a yearning for the higher life, but a desire for luxury and a loss of belief in the capacity of the offspring. Its practice degrades woman both physically and morally, for the production and rearing of children will always be the biological test of her womanhood and her greatest service to the state.'

Our answer is that even with great conjugal restraint there is often too rapid child-bearing; that this tends to lower health and happiness, and to intensify the struggle for existence beyond the limit of useful sifting. Prof. Pembrey speaks of motives, and one recognises the danger that contraceptives may be used to evade the consequences of self-indulgence and free love, but it is a gross error to suppose that the motives behind the control of births are necessarily selfish.

Our view is that a diminished birth-rate, within limits of safety, tends to improve the health of children and mothers, and may tend to substitute quality for quantity. Better forty millions healthy and vigorous and joyous, than sixty millions riddled with bad health, weakness, and depression. There may be a price to pay for diminishing the birth-rate, but it may have its reward in making life less anxious, more secure, and with greater possibilities of fineness. We need not be afraid of lack of opportunities for struggle, but the hope is of lifting the struggle away from a scramble around the platter of subsistence. Perhaps birth control will make earlier marriages more feasible; perhaps it will still further increase the independence of women and their opportunities, beyond maternity, for self-expression; perhaps it will work against war, which is partly due to expansive population.

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Perhaps the objections to birth control, which we have tried to state fairly, are stronger than we think; perhaps the price to be paid is heavier than we realise; our point is simply that large families in rapid succession are productive of much bad health and misery, and we see no way out save in such birth control as medical experts will not disapprove of. At the same time we are sure that if we lose the chivalry and tenderness of lovers, the joyousness of the springtime of the heart, the adventurousness of early marriage, and the delight

in having children while we are young enough to sympathise with them, we are missing the most fragrant flowers of life.

The seventh, and it must be the last, suggestion of the biologist trespasses on the field of psychology, for it concerns education. But it is with biological education that we are concerned; and perhaps the most powerful of all levers is here. There are two points of great importance. The first is that increased urbanisation and pre-occupation with mechanism remove the school children more and more from experiences of Animate Nature and from biological ideas. Nature-study is doing wonders, with the current against it, but its necessity is not sufficiently recognised. Necessity we say, for the advancement of health is in part dependent on having some understanding and appreciation of growing and developing, of varying and habit-forming, of the beauty and ecstasy of life. Much as we may dislike it, there is no escaping the nemesis of being too much taken up with chemistry and physics-wonderlands as they are. There is nothing that can replace biological experience and biological ideas. It is the lack of them that partly accounts for the apathy of many minds to the ideal of health; it is the lack of them that partly accounts for false ideas of wealth and success, and for false methods which forget that things organic cannot be manufactured, but must grow. One always welcomes a statesman or an administrator who knows about the country and loves it.

The biologist's second note on education will probably excite more disapproval. Considered biologically, education is the control of nurture so as to induce the best possible development of hereditary nature, meaning by 'best' that which makes most definitely for the kind of life that is a satisfaction in itself. Education is the endeavour to shorten the individual's recapitulation of racial evolution, and the endeavour to help the individual to utilise the extra-organismal social heritage, that is to say, all that is registered in literature, art, institutions, and stored knowledge.

It is generally admitted that education seeks to develop the personality partly by feeding the mind and partly by mental gymnastics, the two methods often

overlapping. Thus arithmetic is an excellent brainstretcher, but it is not much of a mental food. History, properly taught, is good food; but it is not a suitable gymnastic for young minds. Now, leaving aside the problem of mental gymnastics, our question is: What is the most profitable, the most indispensable, kind of mental equipment? What are the essential furnishings of the mind, if we mean by furnishings not static pieces of information, but idea-seeds that develop roots and shoots, leaves and flowers and fruit? What kinds of living knowledge are most essential? The sad answer is: those that are most conspicuously absent in the youth leaving school to-day. Our educational endeavours form the most colossal instance of misdirected wellintentioned energy in the world. Our son asks us for bread, and at great cost to ourselves and to him we coerce him into accepting a stone-of varied texture, but never nutritive. Our son asks us for a fish (nature study, of course), and we press upon him a serpent, like premature chemistry; he asks us for an egg (history, for instance), and with a heroic gesture we direct his attention to a scorpion (such as grammar). No doubt all this is passing. Our point is that the quicker it passes the healthier we shall be.

Pupils leaving school should be interested in the world without, both animate and inanimate; they should be able and willing to make short excursions-metaphorical and literal-by themselves. They should have 'open sesames' to treasure-caves and keys to treasurerooms, and the curiosity to use them. They should be familiar with some good examples, showing how new knowledge has been gained, and how the search for clearness has brought new control over things and life; they should be aware of the general meaning of a Law of Nature-a uniformity of sequence that can be relied on, in which no wishes of man can produce a shadow of turning; and they should have a sense of joyous wonder. To speak thus, you say, is like a child crying for the moon, but that is not so, for all we look for in the case of the less promising material is that their face should be set in the right direction. As things are, we attempt too much and miss the whole. We enforce premature and often insincere analysis, and we kill interest.

Vol. 246.-No. 487.

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