Notes to Chapter 5: Eugenics

1 Plato, The Republic, trans. H.D.P. Lee, p. 215.

2 Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Prindple of Population, 6th edn, p. 269.

3 Origin, VI:98: 'I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creatuxe was produced as monstrous as a whale.' Most people could see many difficulties, and in the face of great ridicule Darwin dropped this example after the first edition.

4 Letter to an unknown American correspondent, 14 March(?) 1861. So dated by George Sarton, 'Darwin's conception of the theory of natural selection', Isis, vol. 26 (March 1937), p. 340.

5 Francis Galton coined eugenics in his Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883). His fullest definition is the one adopted in this chapter: 'the study of agencies under social control which may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally'.

6 G.K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature p. 94.

7 John Maynard Smith, 'Eugenics and Utopia', Daedalus, vol. 94 (Spring 1965), pp. 487-505.

8 Raymond Lee Muncy gives a full account of Oneida's eugenic experiment in Sex and Marnage in Utopian Communities, pp. 186-92.

9 T.H. Huxley, 'Evolution and ethics', in his Collected Essays, Vol. 9, p. 85.

10 T.H. Huxley, 'Evolution and ethics: prolegomena', in his Collected Essays, Vol. 9, p. 22.

11 ibid., pp. 36-7.

12 [William Rathbone Greg] , 'On the failure of"natural selection" in the case of man', Fraser's Magazine, vol. 78 (September 1868), pp. 353-62.

13 Alfred Russel Wallace, 'Human selection', Fannightly Review, n.s., vol. 48 (September 1890), p. 325. Wallace records this as the gist of his last conversation with Darwin.

14 These two defences of Darwin from the taint of SociaI Darwinism are separated by more than thirty years, but the indignation remains much the same. They are by A.O. Lovejoy in 'Some aspects of Darwin's influence upon modern thought', in Franklin L. Baumer (ed.), Intellectual Movements in Modern European History, p. 126 (first published 1909); and by M.F. Ashley Montagu, 'Further comment [on Social Darwinism l', Science and Society, vol. 6 (Winter 1942), p. 74.

15 It is beyond our scope to enlarge on the reasons for making such a redefinition. R.J. Halliday offers several good ones in his 'Social Darwinism: a definition', Victorian Studies, vol. 14 (June 1971), pp. 389-405. The new definition has the advantage that a long line of opinion can then be traced all the way from the Origin to the American eugenists of extreme opinions, like Charles B. Davenport (1866-1944).

16 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd edn, pp. 206, 216.

17 ibid., p. 206.

18 In a letter to G.A. Gaskell of 15 November 1878: More Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin and A.C. Seward, Vol. 2, p. 50.

19 Karl Pearson, National Life from the Standpoint of Science, 2nd edn, p. 23. The lecture from which this book was developed was given on 19 November 1900.

20 ibid., p. 61.

21 Letter to Darwin, 24 December 1859; printed in Carlos Paton Blocker, Eugenics: Gaiton and After, p. 83.

22 Francis Galton, Memories of My Life, p. 323. The final pages of Galton's autobiography give his eugenic testament in its maturest form.

23 Francis Gaiton, 'Hereditary talent and character', Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 12 (August 1865), pp. 321, 327.

24 Francis Galton, 'Hereditary talent and character', Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 12 (June 1865). Certainly Galton did not overestimate the efficacy of the technique he is advocating. J.B.S. Haldane once calculated that the rate of change of a characteristic under continuous artificial selection might exceed the natural rate of change by up to 300,000 times! See his 'Natural selection', in P.R. Bell (ed.), Darwin's Biological Work: Some Aspects Reconsidered.

25 Francis Galton, Essays in Eugenics, p. 2. This lecture was read before the Anthropological Institute on 29 October 1901.

26 'Nunsowe Green ', A Thousand Years Hence: Being Personal Experiences as Narrated by Nunsowe Green, p. 206.

27 According to Galton in a letter of 23 October 1910, the completed manuscript 'would now fill about 20 to 30 pages of Nineteenth Century size'.: Karl Pearson, Lzfe, Letters and Labours af Francis Gaitan (hereafter Life), Vol. 3B, p. 613.

28 Letter of 6 December 1910: Life, Vol. 3B, p. 615.

29 Letter of 28 December 1910: ibid., Vol. 3B, p. 616.

30 The fragments are published with some critical commentary in ibid., Vol. 3A, pp. 414-24. Further references are in the text.

31 Galton gives as areas for the girls' examination 'grace, beauty, wealth, good temper, accomplished housewifery, and disengaged affections'. It is not clear if these are in order of priority: 'Hereditary talent and character' (August 1865), p. 165.

32 This evaluation of Galton is evident throughout Blacker's Eugenics. L.S. Penrose calls him 'a humanitarian' in 'Ethics and eugenics', in Watson Fuller (ed.), Social Impact of Modern Biology, p. 94.

33 Blacker, Eugenics, p. 122.

34 H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon, pp. 229-30.

35 H.G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, new edn, p. 306.

36 In his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), Wells speaks of Allen's 'very pronounced streak of speculative originality' (Vol. 2, p. 546) but he does not elaborate further on the degree of creative affinity between them. Certainly they shared the freedom (and the isolation) of existing on the fringes of a discipline, and the published work of both is also evidence of their joint desire to subjugate social theory to biology. Both wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette the 1890s and presumably met through their common literary agent, J.B. Pinker.

37 H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (London, 1905), p. 163.

38 Alfred Russel Wallace, 'Human progress: past and future', Arena, vol. 5 (January 1892), p. 148.

39 Wallace, 'Human selection', p. 333.

40 Wallace,'Human progress', p. l57. The 'reformed society' to which he refcrs is modelled on Edward Bellamy's future Boston in Looking Backward (1888). The eugenic effect Wallace describes, however, is purely his own invention. W. Warren Wagar, in his large study Good Tidings: The Belief in Progress from Darwin to Marcuse, mentions Wallace's eugenic proposals but incorrectly dates them 1913 instead of (at the latest) 1892. The point is of some importance because the earlier date disconnects Wallace from the political struggle for emancipation, for which he probably had little sympathy, especially in its more activist form.

41 Richard Le Gallienne, 'Grant Allen', in his Attitudes and Avowals: with Some Retrospective Reviews, p. 190.

42 Allen's important review of Weismann was for the Academy, vol. 37 (1 February 1890), pp. 83-4, and is considered further below. There is a full account of the part played by Allen in bringing Watson into the public gaze in James G. Nelson, William Watson, pp. 19ff.

43 Edward Dowden, 'The scientific movement and literature', in his Studies in Literature, 1789-1877, p. 90. On this assumption Dowden proceeds to build a case for the evolving structure of literature having a partly biological basis. This issue of the development of colour vision was given a generous airing in the Victorian periodicals, and the literary evidence was well mustered by the orientalist Max Mueller. The whole theory is now generally considered to be exploded. Allen's The Colour Sense (1879) was accepted by Trubner's on Samuel Butler's recommendation, which may in part explain Allen's fairly magnanimous treatment of his 'evolution' books (see below).

44 Letter from Huxley to Allen, 2 May 1882. Quoted by Edward Clodd, Grant Allen: A Memoir..., p. 112.

45 Grant Allen, 'Evolution, old and new...; Academy, vol. 15 (17 May 1879), pp. 426-7.

46 George John Romanes, 'Unconscious memory...', Nature, vol. 23 (27 January 1881), pp. 285-7.

47 Grant Allen, 'Essays upon Heredity' (review of Weismann's Essays), Academy, vol. 37 (1 February 1890), pp. 83, 84.

48 Grant Allen, 'The girl of the future', Universal Review, vol. 7 (May 1890), p. 61.

49 Grant Allen, 'The child of the phalanstery', first appeared in Belgravia, vol. 54 (August 1884), pp. 163-7, under the pseudonym 'J. Arbuthnot Wilson'. It was reprinted with slight revisions in Twelve Tales, pp. 45-64. Quotations in the text are from the earlier version.

50 Galton does not allow for any exceptions to these general edicts. Yet, incongruously, in the next paragraph he piously maintains that 'the child should be in no way discouraged on account of its natural defect'! Life, Vol. 3A, p. 416.

51 [Ellis James Davis], Pyrna: a Commune; or, Under the Ice, pp. 105-12.

52 Etymonia, p.199. It is not, perhaps, entirely redundant to confirm that both this author and Davis are perfectly serious in their proposals.

53 Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences, 2nd edn, p. 411. The phrase is in both the first (1869) and second (1892) editions.