The inferiority of photographs to the best works of artists, so far as resemblance is concerned, lies in their catching no more than a single expression. If many photographs of a person were taken at different times, perhaps even years apart, their composite would possess that in which a single photograph is deficient.

One of the effects of civilization is to diminish the rigour of the application of the law of natural selection. It preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.

All male animals, including men, when they are in love, are apt to behave in ways that seem ludicrous to bystanders.

We shall therefore take an appropriately correct view of the origin of our life, if we consider our own embryos to have sprung immediately from those embryos whence our parents were developed, and these from the embryos of their parents, and so on for ever. We should in this way look on the nature of mankind, and perhaps on that of the whole animated creation, as one Continuous System, ever pushing out new branches in all directions, that variously interlace, and that bud into separate lives at every point of interlacement.

I do not so easily think in words.... after being hard at work having arrived at results that are perfectly clear... I have to translate my thoughts in a language that does not run evenly with them.

Well-washed and well-combed domestic pets grow dull; they miss the stimulus of fleas.

We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea.