victims of hereditarily transmissible diseases (including mental and venereal diseases and alcoholism); (c) those subject to severe congenital defects of vision, hearing, and speech. Any eugenics program would have to be administered with greater care than it would be likely to receive, however, lest it result in more harm than good to the race.

(2) Organic needs. The human organism has its beginning when, through the union of the sexes, a fertilized germ cell begins the long and complex process of cell division which finally results in the finished human product. This process is not completed at birth. It leads to the progressive specialization of cells as to structure and function, until eventually the entire assemblage of muscle, nerve, gland, bone, blood, germ, connective and other cells has put in its appearance, and the different parts of the body have assumed their characteristic general relations to each other. If the human organism were tremendously enlarged, we could see each of these cells separately functioning as a living being with about the same degree of independence of other cells that individuals show when they are engaged in a variety of more or less similar tasks requiring different degrees of coöperation.

The various parts of the developed organism are arranged in a number of partly coördinated systems. Each of these systems is in part independent and performs its own peculiar functions, while at the same time it remains in more or less close association with the other systems, and continually acts in concert with them in any one of a large number of ways. The organism is therefore a rather loose aggregate of interacting parts or systems, among which may be named the respiratory, circulatory, digestive and excretory, glandular (including sexual), and nervous (or neuromuscular) systems. That these systems to a considerable degree depend on each other is shown by the fact that they seldom function separately and alone. At the same time complete coördination is never realized, for although many coördinations not present at birth are established later on, the process is never carried very far in proportion to the possibilities, and disturbances of existing coördinations are also continually

taking place. Among the many coördinations that are achieved are all of the manifold instances of learning; while among the numerous disturbances of existing coördinations are such things as nervous indigestion, where the ability of the stomach and intestines to digest food and excrete waste is affected by changes in the nervous system brought about by psychological maladjustments.

An organic need may be defined as anything requisite to the functioning of a biological system, either when it is working in comparative isolation or in intimate association with other systems.

The interfunctioning of parts characteristic of living things cannot continue for any length of time without the support and assistance of external materials and energies, since the activities involved in these interactions (as we have seen), are not purely organic, but must cross and recross at nearly every moment the membranes and other boundaries which after a fashion serve to separate the organism from its environment. If, therefore, the organism is to remain alive and functioning, the environment must not fail to provide whatever may be necessary for the maintenance of its activities.

The various parts of the organism are capable of functioning without trouble and friction only when their organic needs are satisfied within certain rather fixed limits. Thus the respiratory system needs air, but, more than this, it needs air of a particular quality in stated quantities at fixed intervals, and disturbances of function of one sort or another are certain to occur whenever the supply is diminished or adulterated. Elaborate ventilation devices are installed in public buildings to insure an uninterrupted supply of good air; and the gaseous and solid impurities poured into the atmosphere of a great city cannot fail to affect the health and well-being of its inhabitants. Thus Kelsey reports that the smoke emitted from Pittsburgh industrial plants contains about three million tons of sulphur yearly, or enough to dissolve 265,000 tons of iron, and that soot is deposited each year in central London at the rate of 426 tons per square mile.5

The organic needs of a human being are many and various. Although they are obliquely dealt with in connection with the study of physiology, no investigator seems to have undertaken the difficult task of listing, describing, and classifying them. The extent to which organic needs are met in any group is of the first importance in determining the primary life satisfactions open to members of that group. While no living arrangements can utterly disregard these needs and long endure, a certain margin of maladaptation is possible and perhaps inevitable under the conditions of human life. Thus although there are constant pressures towards some degree of correspondence between these life needs and the activities of the group, the adaptation is never very exact, and usually falls far short of what one might desire.

The pressures tending to make organic needs and group activities correspond do not work, however, in but one direction. Group behaviors often have the effect of defining the precise nature of organic needs. Among the basic human needs, for example, men rightly include exercise and rest. Unless the muscles are frequently brought into vigorous play, the blood sent coursing through the veins, and the general level of bodily tonus heightened, we become flabby and soft in all our parts. Unless, on the other hand, we are able periodically to loll about and invite our souls while the body rebuilds the structures that have been torn down under even the normal strains of life, we become restless and enervated. The character of this need for exercise and rest, however, has not remained unchanged throughout the course of human history. Who ever heard of a primitive man exercising for the sake of the exercise itself? Yet this is precisely what contemporary city dwellers find it necessary to do. The need for exercise has become crucial in their lives. Graham Wallas has pointed out how the conditions of modern life have elicited not only new forms of fatigue and new susceptibilities to it, but also new capacities for work and effort."

This same matter of work and play may be used to illustrate the curious inversions and adaptations among our activities that may occur without fatally transgressing biolog

ical law. Activities may become tied up with the satisfaction of needs which at first glance hardly seem pertinent to them. Work is usually regarded as the expending of strength or thought for the attainment of an external end; whereas play is taken to mean activity engaged in for its own sake. Americans, however, are often accused of turning their play into work. Instead of pleasurably luxuriating in a loose and rather random release of energies when they play their games, the desire for mastery and success (both of which are socially generated urges external to the actual activities involved) pushes them on to the most strenuous exertions. Through laborious practice and great hardships they become exceedingly proficient, but only at the cost of turning their games into businesses requiring unremitting application. In order to husband their energies such persons are forced to treat their "work" as play. Some rather remarkable features of American college life are here in point. Many students really do all their work on the athletic fields or in other extracurricular activities, and merely play their way through their studies. The former activities have become the accredited channels of intense endeavor, and the classroom becomes a place for day dreaming, idle speculation, mild surmise, and general intellectual looseness. The situation is not an entirely happy one, since the games really seem better adapted than the classroom to the purposes of play. Whether the classroom is really adapted to the purposes of work is, of course, another question.

It is often desirable to distinguish organic needs with pronounced social components from those which remain relatively unchanged from one environment to another. This we may do by calling the former developed or derivative needs. Needs of both types should also be distinguished from things which are merely desired, since it is obvious. that a thing may be desired (or wanted) although it is neither an organic nor a derivative need, as these terms have been defined above. Thus a little child may beg for more candy, although (as we say) "It isn't good for him." Whether all organic needs are good for us is a delicate question that can hardly be answered in the present state of our knowledge;

but it is certainly possible for a derived need to be biologically harmful as for example the socially developed need for certain stimulants.

(3) Social continuity. From the very beginning we are immersed in a world which is not of our own making. It is an organized world of persons and things, disposed in certain fairly fixed relations to each other and arranged in a great diversity of patterns. But little study and reflection are required to demonstrate that these social relations and patterns have had a history, that few of them are of recent origin, and that all of them could not possibly have originated at the same time and under the same conditions. Into this world. which perpetuates and enshrines elements from so many different pasts we must fit ourselves, and in doing so we are brought under the influence of an immense social heritage.

It would be difficult indeed to overestimate the range and diversity of this social heritage in the case of even the simplest culture. Nor is it easy to exaggerate the subtlety with which the social forms insinuate themselves into the recesses of our lives. We live and move and have our being within their confines. Gradually and painlessly (for the most part) they become woven into our lives, until our most private natures become indistinguishable from their patterns. If at times we feel moved to disown the social inheritance, we know not whither to turn, for in denying it we should be forced to renounce ourselves. To grow up in and absorb a way of life is to be created in its image. Minor changes and innovations of no great significance are of common occurrence in every group, but such things have little effect in altering the steady social pressures under which men live. Only to the extraordinarily gifted, or to the extraordinarily lucky, is it given to break even a few of the bonds which bind men to their group the gifted man may now and then by sheer power carve out some new thing, the lucky man may now and then by fool's right stumble on what was hid.

That social factors are absolutely indispensable in the formation of developed human beings is strikingly shown by the pitiful stories of presumably normal individuals who for one reason or another have grown up since infancy in isola