Suchergebnisse

The publication of a history* of that remarkable organisation, the Ciba Foundation, by an author working on the inside and having access to all relevant material, is something of an event and gives a welcome opportunity for a personal appreciation by one who was at the birth if not at the conception.

Man is essentially a gregarious animal and is subject, therefore, to both biological and social pressures. As a result, almost everything hedoes has biosocial reper cussions. This is especially true of reproduction, which is a biological process with an overriding social impact. If human reproduction came to an end, so would the human race. By contrast the present unprecedented combination of a high repro ductive rate and a high survival rate is causing widespread concern. One may takethe view that mankind, by reason of its exploding numbers, is rushing to a Gadarene doom, or the opposite view that man has brains as well as gonads and will cope with his proliferation. In either case, one must admit that at the present time there is a population problem.

In December last year I received a letter from Dr Egon Szabady, Director of the Demographic Research Institute in Budapest, Hungary, calling my attention to the publication by the Institute of the abstracts of papers given at the 9th Hungarian Congress of Biology held in May 1970. Dr Szabady also enclosed a copy of the script of his opening address at the Congress, Population Science and Human Biology, in which he referred to letters which passed between Francis Galton and Jozsef Kórösi between 1894 and 1897, and a reprint of his paper, published in Demographia 1970, which gives a full account, with some facsimiles, of this correspondence. On inquiry, I found that this contact between these two great men of science had attracted little attention—Pearson's massive biography of Galton contains only two references to Kórösi, one to isogens constructed by Galton from Kórösi's Budapest data and the other to Kórösi's death. I wrote, therefore, to Dr Szabady asking permission to use his material in a note in JBS. In reply, Dr Szabady not only gave me his permission and that of the library of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office which holds the originals, but also sent me photographs of two postcards and two short letters not included, either in print or facsimile, in his Demographia paper. Additionaly, he sent me photographs of the two letters from Kórösi to Galton, published in print in Demographia, explaining that the copies held by the library of the Central Statistical Office were Blurred Because of being made by Kórösi on very thin paper. However, they showed, what I had not previously realized, that Kórösi's letters were written in English. I am most grateful to Dr Szabady for this courtesy.

The word environment is here used to mean the total environment, physical and social, which for man means primarily the climatic and cultural conditions under which he lives and breeds. Fertility is used in the demographic sense of reproductive performance as contrasted with fecundity, or potential reproductive capacity.

The Board of the Marie Stopes Memorial Foundation organized in 1971 the first of a series of Marie Stopes Memorial Lectures to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the opening of her first clinic in Holloway in 1921 (Taylor, 1971). A second lecture was arranged in 1972 (Mitchell, 1973). For 1973, the Board decided to vary the pattern and asked us to write an account of the clinic in the 1920s and 1930s, a neglected subject compared with the voluminous studies of Marie Stopes herself. In accepting this invitation, we realized that there was some factual material available, but that for the human touch we should have to rely largely on those still available who knew the clinic in its early days. It seemed therefore that the interview technique would be best suited to bringing out the highlights. In this we have been fortunate in having the most helpful co-operation.