16 Eugenics [photo of group of men rowing] [photo credit]Underwood and Underwood [caption] Heredity on Trial? "The way the boys perform the first mile depends upon their training; the second mile depends upon their life habits, the third mile depends upon how their fathers lived, and the fourth mile depends upon their ancestors generally." [text] night blindness and susceptibility to cancer as well as to a tendency to health and longevity and numerous other structural and physiological characteristics are heritable, thus justifying Irish Pat's sage dictum that "a family tree is a foine thing if it ben't too shady?" And that if we used as much intelligence in human mating as we use in breeding horses and cows, we could surely breed out some of the ills as well as breed in some of the excellencies now inhering in our flesh? Shall we humans not realize what God is trying to do for us and how He suggests that we participate with Him in [italics]conscious[end italics] evolution? Should not the church following the lead of Jesus, who preached capacity self-fulfillment for the individual, be mightily interested in any program that would aid children to be physically well-born? And it is but a step form anatomical structure and physiology to mental faculties and moral endowments. If brain structure and brain size are heritable, is it a very far leap to brain characteristics? Is it of any importance to our civilization to know that in a study of 476 children born to 144 marriages among feeble-minded folk only six were normal? Professor Shull of the University of Michigan declares, "It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that mental ability is mostly, if not solely, determined by heredity; and that while success in intellectual pursuits may be modified by other things than mental ability, nevertheless native ability furnishes the bulk of the basis of achievement." And when in addition to mental faculties heredity seems to add moral endowments, so that when Martin Kallikak, a revolutionary soldier, became the illegitimate father of a child by a feeble-minded girl with the result of 480 known and traced descendants, most of them liabilities, and then, marrying a cultured woman of good ancestry and starting a new line, had 496 known and traced descendants, most of them assets, the church from the highest motives imaginable, that of bringing in a present Kingdom of God, can well include within its purview the extreme desirability of seeing the individual starting toward capacity self-fulfillment by being well-born. In [italics]The Builders of America[end italics] Professors Huntington and Whit- [end]