Picturesque Eugenics

Picturesque Eugenics

THE NEXT AGE OF MAN--Albert Edward Wiggam -- Bobbs-Merrill ($3). "Plainly, it is a crisis in the affairs of human beings." It is a time not far distant, according to Author Wiggam, when the two hormones which control female reproductive organs will be harnessed, put into pills, sold at corner drug stores. Thus will parents be able to determine the nature and the number of their offspring. A finer race will be bred. Evolution will become "peaceful, happy, benign."

Author Wiggam, a picturesque eugenist, has a propensity for digging into the modern discoveries of biology, explaining them to the lay reader in colorful prose, hopefully adding the wonders that may be.

In a more factual, but still hypothetical, chapter of his book, Author Wiggam lays down the four cornerstones of eugenics:

1) "The mental, temperamental and spiritual traits of man are inherited by the same mechanism and in just about the same degree as are his physical traits."

2) "... the non-inheritance in any large, wholesale way of what are commonly called 'acquired' characters."

3) "Good qualities tend to be associated with one another in the natural make-up of men and women."

4) ". . . the tendency of like to marry like."

Other works of Author Wiggam: The New Decalogue of Science, The Fruit of the Family Tree.