and them is that we proceed at once to burden ourselves with information and obligation which for them did not exist. To compass our languages, sciences, histories, arts, the complicated social, political, moral régime, we are supplied with virtually the same minds that primitive man used for his primitive needs. Is it any wonder, he asks, that "education" is the central problem for our or any other advanced civilization?

The biologist asks whether it is not high time to look beyond this artificial bolster of education, to the possibility of actual improvement of the innate mental abilities of man. The student of heredity and evolution looking at this problem has two contributions to make. First, if the mental capabilities of the present race are too limited, increase them; if our minds are too weak to carry the burdens which now must be carried, do not give up the task—strengthen the racial mind. Second, if we should seem to be in danger of developing a stock which is well fitted and able to carry the load of mental acquirement and to push on intellectually, but which is at the same time physically deficient, weak, or sterile, or susceptible to disease, do not let the intellectual capabilities diminish, but build up the physical constitution to a higher supporting level. These are not idle suggestions nor whimsical schemes. The biologist makes them knowing that these things are possible; not only possible, they must be accomplished. We are foolishly building our civilization in the form of an inverted pyramid of individually acquired characteristics. This structure can be made stable only by supplying a broader basis of innate ability which can safely carry the load. This is the first biological warning to sociology.

The second warning we may put in the form in which Ray Lankester in his "Kingdom of Man" has recently presented it so strikingly and which we may abstract freely and with some interpolation. "In Nature's struggle for existence, death ... is the fate of the vanquished, while the only reward to the victors ... is the permission to reproduce their kind—to carry on by heredity to another generation, the specific qualities by which they triumphed." The origin of man, partly, at any rate, by such a process of natural selection, is one chapter in his history. Another begins with the development of his mental qualities, which are of such unprecedented power in Nature. These qualities so dominate all else in his "living" activities that they largely cut him off from the general operations of natural selection. Perhaps the only direction in which natural selection is the chiefly operative factor in human evolution to-day is in the development of immunity from infectious disease. Just as man is a new departure in the unfolding scheme of the world, so his presence and characteristics lead to new methods of evolution, of survival, and the like. Knowledge, reason, self-consciousness, will, are new processes in Nature, and it is these which have largely determined the direction of man's history. Nature's discipline of death is more or less successfully resisted by the will of man. Man is Nature's Rebel. "Where Nature says 'Die'! Man says 'I will live.'" By his wits and his will man has overcome many of Nature's bounds and difficulties without changing, as other organisms would, his innate characteristics. Not only this but man has obtained control of his surroundings and at every step of his development he has receded farther from the rule of Nature. Now "he has advanced so far and become so unfitted to the earlier rule, that to suppose that Man can 'return to Nature' is as unreasonable as to suppose that an adult animal can return to its mother's womb."

But at present man puts into operation no real substitute for natural selection. "The standard raised by the rebel man is not that of fitness to the conditions proffered by extra-human Nature, but is one of ideal comfort, prosperity, and conscious joy of life—imposed by the will of man and involving a control, and in important respects a subversion, of what were Nature's methods of dealing with life before she had produced her insurgent son." Progress in the control of Nature has been going on with enormous rapidity during the last two centuries particularly—the "nature searchers" have placed almost limitless power in the hands of men. And yet the builders of society and governments and nations have failed to profit by this increase in natural knowledge. In our social and national organization we remain fixed in the old paths of ignorance. Lankester says: "I speak for those who would urge the conscious and deliberate assumption of his kingdom by Man—not as a matter of markets and of increased opportunity for the cosmopolitan dealers in finance—but as an absolute duty, the fulfillment of Man's destiny." The purpose of his essay is "to point out that civilized man has proceeded so far in his interference with extra-human Nature, has produced for himself and for the living organisms associated with him such a special state of things, by his rebellion against natural selection and his defiance of pre-human dispositions, that he must either go on and acquire firmer control of the conditions, or perish miserably by the vengeance certain to fall on the half-hearted meddler in great affairs." Man is a fighting rebel who at every forward step lays himself open to the liabilities of greater penalties should his attack prove unsuccessful. Moreover, while emancipating himself from the destructive and progressive methods of Nature, man has accumulated a new series of dangers and difficulties with which he must incessantly contend and which he must finally control. Man has taken a tremendous step—created desperate conditions by the exercise of his will—further control is essential in order that he should escape from final misery and destruction.

Nor is this idle, academic invective. The biologist knows that this is true. It is not idle, for man has the means at his command—it is merely a question of their employment. This, then, is the second biological warning to sociology and to statecraft.

Now we may return to consider briefly the nature of those social data which we suggested force us to think seriously of the problem of man's future.

As a primary datum we may note the increasing population of the countries of Europe and North America (Fig. 1). The countries whose population is increasing most rapidly are the United States, Russia, and the German Empire. We know that one important factor of the increase in this country is that of immigration, but this is not sufficient to account for the total. There is continued multiplication of the native population, and of the immigrant after he is here. We wish only to point out in connection with this diagram the steady trend of the population upward, and the fact that obviously somewhere there must be a limit. This cannot go on without end.

(From "Statistical Atlas," Twelfth Census of the United States.)
Fig. 1. INCREASE OF POPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES AND THE PRINCIPAL COUNTRIES OF EUROPE FROM 1600 TO 1900

An extremely pertinent fact here has been disclosed by Pearson and is based upon very extensive observations among several different classes and nations. It is this—that one fourth of the married population of the present