lesson of selecting seed corn; if a state may spend hundreds of thousands every year for exhibitions of blooded stock, the triumphs of horticulture, the fleetness of the race-horse, may it not be worth while to ask an equally serious consideration of the same state and its citizens to the no less equally important problem of how to select and improve the seed destined to yield its fruition in human brains? And on the other hand, lauding the laws which warrant the slaughter of tuberculous herds, and the common sense of the farmer who relegates his scrubs and dwarfs to the shambles, what are these same sensible people doing toward a similar process of eliminating defective and unprofitable human stock? Almost nothing. Almost! It is matter for note that already nearly a dozen states have taken steps to cure some of these human blights. There is not time for details, but they exist. Such are glimpses of facts all too common and dominant. They cry for attention and intelligent treatment. They constitute in a special sense an educational problem the importance of which is beyond computation. It is our problem; what is to be our attitude?
Educational Eugenics.—It has seemed to me for some time that there should be found an application for the principles of eugenics in the work of education in general, and for that of higher education in particular. In seeking light on the problem I have submitted certain queries to a considerable number whose work or concern in such matters I know to be great enough to warrant inquisition. For example, to Dr. Davenport I put the following:
I have long felt that for some reason we are failing to get the best results from college training, due in part, as I believe, to the fact that instead of affording opportunity and stimulus to the capable student, to the man of brains and fitness, the dead level of mediocrity is a constant check on just the man who could profit by it. We level down to the average man or below, and the capable fellow, unless selected by individual interest, is left to drift in idleness or worse. Can there not be devised some means whereby the incapable may be deflected from a college course? Why may it not be practicable to devise a scheme of entrance tests whereby some sort of mental pedigree may be made evident? Why not include pedigree examinations as a part of the medical examination now generally exacted?
To another was asked this additional question:
Can not a means be found for giving to eugenics a distinctly educational direction as well as the conventional physical? The crucial query is How to get at it?
To still another:
American education has been recently designated as a Proliferating mediocrity. How can this charge be refuted? What is the way out? Is it not possible to secure some sort of family-school-pedigree record as a basis for education?
To these varied inquiries various replies have been received. Some have been extremely suggestive, others have been conservative to the point of the worse than helpless. For example, one in reply says
