We have to be content to determine not what the infant is but when it be likely to be, and that involves a knowledge of the laws of heredity which we are only learning slowly to acquire.

We may all in our humble ways help to increase that knowledge by giving it greater extension and more precision through the observations we are able to make on our own families.

To such observations Galton attached great importance and strove in various ways to further them.

Detailed records, physical and mental, beginning from birth, are still far from being as common as is desirable, although it is obvious that they possess a permanent personal and family private interest in addition to their more public scientific value.

We do not need, and it would indeed be undesirable, to emulate in human breeding the achievements of a Luther Burbank.