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Show CHILDREN AND ENVIRONMENT. The Standard has always opposed the idea that heredity has a greater influence than environment and finds support for its views in the reply of Dr. Eichholz to the poisition taken by Dr. David Starr Jordan of Stanford University, who says that the incapable, inefficient ineffic-ient and infirm of body and mind are the result of heredity." With that as a basis, Dr. Jordan has advocated that the quickest way to improve the human race is to prevent the unfit from marrying." Dr. Eichholz, addressing the physicians gathered in London for the study of human physical deterioration, said: "There is little, if anything, to justify the conclusion that neglect, ne-glect, poverty and parental ignorance, serious as their results are, possess any marked hereditary effect, or that heredity plays any significant sig-nificant part in establishing the physical degeneracy of the poorer population." Nature does much for the child. There is an effort made to overcome over-come parental defects and blemishes. Occasionally the sins of the father are visited upon the child, but the worst thing children are forced to contend against is not the weaknesses inflicted by parental infirmities, but the example in loose morals and habits set by older people. The average tot of the slums, where fathers and mothers are addicted to nearly every vice that ruins and destroys body and mind, can bo placed in a clean atmosphere, where those terrible vices are not in evidence and are not practiced, and be reared so as to make a useful member of society. The child mind is impressionable' and habits formed in childhood child-hood are most difficult to overcome. That is why environment has more to do with forming character than has heredity. |