L. Querton.Practical Eugenics.
county associations, which themselves should be under the guidance of a
national association charged with the direction of the control of the whole
country. The eugenic associations thus included would be in reality only the
development of the institution actually charged with establishing the civil
status of the individual.
Their mission would bring with it in the future a more direct and pro
longed control, the object of which would be especially to look after
children who claim special protection, such as orphans, morally defective
children, neglected or abnormal children. In fine, we believe that the
practical and continued organization of eugenic action by local associations
would act as a means of education for private individuals and public
authorities, at the same time as it would ensure the efficacy of the application
of the laws relating to the protection and education of childhood. It would
facilitate the collection of documents indispensable to the scientific know
ledge of the facts of heredity, and it would govern in a direct manner the
actual operations which the various social institutions exercise on the
development of the race.
MARRIAGE LAWS AND CUSTOMS.
C. B. Davenport,
Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, N.Y.
The subject matter of eugenics is offspring and offspring imply parents.
For legal and other reasons society regards a knowledge of parentage as
very important. Marriage is society’s method of securing that knowledge.
Incidentally the arrangement of marriage is of value for eugenical studies,
in fact the principles of eugenics could hardly be established in its absence.
But society asks not only for a registry of matings but seeks to control,
in some degree, the nature of the matings. On the one hand it seeks to
protect monogamy and the young from the legal consequences of marriage.
On the other hand, the nature of control measures, roughly, the result of
society’s experience that certain matings result in undesirable offspring.
Let us, accordingly, examine some of these laws.
The most widespread marriage regulation of biological import in modern
civilized states is that which limits the relationship of those whose mating
may receive a legal sanction. In practically all of the States of the Union
marriage of brother and sister, of parent and child, even of grandparent
and grandchild is forbidden, and it is sometimes expressly stated that
such marriages have no legal standing. In most States the marriage of
