Evening star., 1924-08-09
LIFE EVERLASTING
SOLVED FOR WORM
One Species Can Be Made to
Live Indefinitely by 0cca-
sionaI Cutting Up.
BY EDWIN e. SLOSSON,
Director, Science Service.

TORONTO. August 9.-Prof. Julian
s. Huxley of Oxford told and showed
many of the amazing achievements
of modern biologists in the control
of life at a citizens meeting held by
the British Association for Advance
ment of Science here tonight.
He showed photographs of re-
juvenated dogs and rats or flatworms
that could be made to live indefinitely
by cutting them into pieces occa-
sionally; of sea creatures that could
be reduced to the egg stage and
grown up again; of imbecile cretins
that were changed to normal smiling
children by thyroid extract. He told
his audience how tadpoles could be
speeded up In their life processes and
converted prematurely into frogs no
bigger than flies by squeezing a few
drops from the thyroid gland into
the water in which they lived. Or,
on the contrary, how by exercising
their thyroid tadpoles could be kept
IN the immature stage until they
were three times the normal tadpole
size. The biologist is now able to
distinguish the Sex of germ cells by
counting their chromosomes, and Prof
Huxley ventured the opinion that
Wlthin 10 years or less it may be
possible to determine sex artificially.
Cause of Race Suicide.
Is race suicide due to natural or
artificial causes?
Is a declining birth rate q menace
or advantage to a nation?
These questions were discussed by
economists of the association yes
terday.
The director of the London School of
pointed out that the fall in the birth
rate was no gradual trend toward less
fertility, such as has been ascribed to
later marriages the city-wide move
ment of population, and other causes,
but definite biological revolution
which can be located as beginning
about 1881. Up to that time there
had been no serious decline in the
birth rate of Western Europe or any
other part of the world for which CEN
sus figures exist: from that time
forth 1t became almost universal.
Discovery of Methods.
The sudden development of birth
control at that particular date was
not" the speaker inferred, due to
any increase in the need for con-
troll but to improvements in the means
of control to Invention and exploita-
tion of new powers over nature, like
powder. but unlike them in being
driven underground by public opinion
and the law. The fact that birth con-
troll developed not when. or because it
was particularly needed. but when
and because the means of control
happened to be improved-i. e., as the
result of an underground invention
makes it all the more important to
study scientifically and discuss frankly
all the possible effects of control un-
der varying conditions, on health, on
numbers, on the quality of population,
and on social institutions"
High in Catholic Areax.S
The birth rate remained high in
Roman Catholic countries such as Ire
land and Italy, where artificial means
of limiting births are opposed on re-
ligious grounds. The only Protestant
nations keeping up the big family GUS
tom after 1881 were in thinly populated
Scandinavia. In Holland the Catholic
provinces of Limburg and North Bra
bant and the very sparsely peopled
province of Drenthe are the only ones
in which the birth rate fell by less
This sudden and dramatic change from
big families to small makes the period
of the 1SS0's, according to Sir William
Beveridge, one of the crucially signifi-
cant turning points of human history.
That the decline in the birth rate has
pceh accompanied ny leSSeIeO mortality
is great gain in human happiness.
but the speaker pointed out that even
this has it dubious side, since a COM
munity of stationary population with
no great surging influx of new births
becomes too readily nation of con-
servative old men and women.
Split in Two Classes.
An analysis of the British census
by Prof. r. NJ. MacIver of the Univer-
sity of Toronto confirms the common
opinion that the most successful
classes with respect to wealth and
social recognition are the least sue
Dividing the British population into
classes, with capitalists, employer
and highly educated professions at
the top and the unskilled laborer at
the bottom, each step downward of
the social scale shows an increase in
offset to some degree by a higher
death rate.
Prof. James A. Field raised the
timely question as to whether eugen-
lists were not on the wrong track in
assuming that relatively low birth
was necessarily a sign of racial deca-
dence. The economic virtues which
lead to wealth are not at all the same
as the biological merits In which the
eugenist Is interested. Our present
competitive economic system makes
children handicap and often gives
special advantage to qualities which
from the biological point of view are
yalueless or worse. The eugenist is
less concerned to multiply captains of
Industry or specialized geniuses than
to encourage a normal type of sanity,