ENVIRONMENT When a child is born it has been subjected for some three-quarters of a year already to the influences of environment.

Its race, indeed, was fixed once for all at the moment of conception.

Yet that superadded measure of plasticity, which has to be treated as something apart from the racial factor, enables it to respond for good or for evil to the pre-natal--that is to say, maternal--environment.

Thus we may easily fall into the mistake of supposing our race to be degenerate, when poor feeding and exposure to unhealthy surroundings on the part of the mothers are really responsible for the crop of weaklings that we deplore.

And, in so far as it turns out to be so, social reformers ought to heave a sigh of relief.