New Britain herald., 1916-01-31
PLEA FOR EUGENICS
 BY REV. WIZ. COOK
Stronger Marriage as We'll as Di-
 VorCe Laws Needed, He Says

In a sermon on "Heredity," de- livered at Trinity Methodist Episcopal
 church at the service last night, Rev.
 Warren F. Cook, the pastor, advo-
 cated stronger marriage laws and uni
 form divorce laws. The speaker took TOT hls text a passage from Ezekiel
 1S-2: The fathers have eaten sour
 grapes and the children's teeth are
 set on edge.' The drew comparisons
 between plant and animal life and
 said that eugenic laws should be fol- lowed The sermon in part follows:
 We dc not come into this world
 as blank sheet of paper with noth-
 ing written upon it. Certain well de-
 fined tendencies are fixed in us be-
 fore birth. The child often bears
 physical features like one or the other
 of his parents, and more often reveals
 ikenesses or much deeper and more
 significant character. The old lady
 was quite right when she said that
 the time to begin to train a child was
 100 years before it was born.
 'There is a law of life that is fixed in the blood which is more exacting than a law of the land or school or so- ciety. This passage from Ezekiel was a proverb even then. Men long ago learned that the deeds of the fathers show their faces in the lives of the children. The disciples recognized this law when they asked Jesus who had sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?
 "The important thing is that this law of heredity is so well established and yet we give so little heed to it in human relations. We have care fully obeyed it in the production of fruits and vegetables. Luther Bur- bank has made himself famous by fol- lowing with due care the workings of this law. The Burbank potatoe is only one of hundreds of his produc- tions following this law of nature. The famous Bartlett pear is not an original product, but cross between the Delaware pear and the bitter Chinese pear. Years ago on the plains of the west grew a very small sweet berry too small for practical To this tiny mother was mated a large hollow tasteless foreign berry and the result is our luscious This is about the only foreign marriage I know of which h-1s been eminently successful. The Jap anese palmatus bears a small, yellow, ! dingy, tasteless berry, but crossed with a Cuthbert it grows six to eight feet high and bears large, sweet, golden berries.
 Same Law Governs Man.
 "The law is just as exacting among animals as among plants. MT. Dar- wins name, so prominent next month md more, if not for the popular heroes, Lincoln and Washington, in some minds the very foremost bene- factor among men, laid his ear close -O this law and listened to the beat of ts life. Yet not only great men, but every chicken fancier who follows the fairs; and every lover of thorough bred dogs or cats or cattle or horses, studies and obeys this law Years ago there was born on the plains of a western state hornless bull calf. Ever since then there has been kind of cattle known as a 'pollid-herford, and this calf is the father of them all On a farm in Massachusetts in 1791 a farmer found one of his lambs with decidedly shorter legs than the others. This was a desirable feature and from this odd species came the famous Ancon sheep.
 Tradition has it that the black stripes forming a cross on the shoul- ierS or the ass nave peen tHeIe Slnce Christ rode the beast into Jerusalem, out tradition has to give way to the experiments of nature. The leopard cannot change his own spots but his children can. The spots of the leopard md the stripes of a zebra and the ong neck of a giraffe may have orig mated through environment, but that loes not account for the color and l shape of a baby of the leopard's and 1 .ebra's and giraffe's born in the Bronx Zoo.
 Mankind Neglected.
 "We have carefully observed and ,beyed the law of heredity with ref erence to plants and animals, but we | nave not by any means been so con- ;istent with human nature. The