It is a rare delight to be able to read the proceedings of a conference within a few months of attending the event. Those who were present at the 1997 Conference of the Galton Institute will relish the opportunity of revisiting at leisure the many excellent papers reproduced here; those who were not have a novel pleasure in store.

This volume is essentially an intellectual stock-taking by a learned society which throughout the last ninety years has, as its Editor points out and the contributors demonstrate, exerted an influence out of all proportion to its small but (dare one say) elite membership. At virtually every interface between the biological and social sciences the Eugenics Society was instrumental in assisting publication, providing funding and other material help. Its role in supporting the birth control organisations of the 1930s, the Abortion Law Reform Association in the 1940s, the IPPF in the 1950s and the establishment of the Journal of Biosocial Science in the 1960s will be familiar to readers of this Newsletter. Less well known perhaps is the early support given by the Society to the Marriage Guidance Council (now Relate) and Political and Economic Planning (now the Policy Studies Institute) and its financing of Solly Zuckerman’s research on the menstrual cycle of primates which, it was hoped, would provide a more precise definition of the “safe period”.

Of more fundamental and lasting significance was the Eugenics Society’s role in the development of some of the new academic specialisms which have emerged in the present century. That role, variously involving grants, the funding of fellowships, publishing facilities and office accommodation, is detailed in chapters devoted to demography, human genetics, psychometrics and biometry. Here are important contributions to the history of science.

The word “eugenics” has now, alas, become a dysphemism, a self-evidently condemnatory label used by journalists (and by others who should know better) to criticise any biological development which they dislike - whether or not it ever formed part of a eugenic programme. It is doubtful if the word can be retrieved for rational discourse; if it cannot it will be no fault of the contributors and publishers of this volume which convincingly presents eugenics as a benign and constructive force in English intellectual endeavour.

Those seeking a one-volume introduction to the English eugenics movement have long relied upon Blacker’s Eugenics: Galton and After. That book, published in 1952, is now forty-five years old and thus covers just half (pre-DNA half) the life of the Institute. One imagines that Blacker would regard Essays in the History of Eugenics as a suitable successor to his own book; certainly he would be gratified to discover that he himself merits as many index entries as did Galton in the earlier work.

Adeline More