Eugenics is the study of the agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally.

The object . . . is to discover methods of condensing information concerning large groups of allied facts into brief and compendious expressions suitable for discussion.

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.

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.

Life is a republic where the individuals are for the most part unconscious that while they are working for themselves they are also working for the public good.

Characteristics cling to families.

It is difficult to understand why statisticians commonly limit their inquiries to Averages, and do not revel in more comprehensive views. Their souls seem as dull to the charm of variety as that of the native of one of our flat English counties, whose retrospect of Switzerland was that, if its mountains could be thrown into its lakes, two nuisances would be got rid of at once.