The groundwork of eugenics / by Karl Pearson.

  • Pearson, Karl, 1857-1936.
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The groundwork of eugenics / by Karl Pearson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    17/60 (page 11)
    THE GROUNDWORK OF EUGENICS 11 in the pigeon-holes in the Laboratory upstairs a good deal of evidence as to the relative intensity of the inheritance and the environment factors. I refer to this point as an illustration of what I mean, when I say that the method of investigating the laws of human societies is changing from the verbal to the statistical, and the problem of the parts played by nature and nurture cannot be solved by appealing vaguely to the excellent work of the schoolmaster or to the admitted advantages of Peabody Buildings. As we are here on the site of what is not unlikely to prove one of the great battlefields of eugenics, I would illustrate, by one example only, how the problem of nature versus nurture has been prejudged. There is hardly a practical text-book on ophthalmology which does not accept the theory that the school is the hotbed for the production of short-sight. If you endeavour to tracethis traditional attitude to its source, you will find that the main authority for it is the work of a German ophthalmologist, Cohn, who examined the eyes of several thousand children, and recorded their increasing myopia with increased number of years at school. From this it is easy, but not logical, to assert that years of school life produce myopia. It would be equally valid to assert that the number of years a boy spends on arithmetic lengthen his head, or, perhaps, more valid still to say that the lengthening of his head produces myopia. Unfortun¬ ately modern civilisation does not admit of our studying several thousand children of civilised parents with normal home environment, growing up without school, and ascer¬ taining whether their short-sight would or would not increase with growth. But Cohn's original work gives us ground for pause ; he has not only published a table giving the years at school, but also a table giving the years of age in conjunction with