These papers go together because, to different degrees, they relate to the British eugenics movement. In these circumstances, the most appropriate role for the commentator is surely that of outlining the current state of understanding of eugenics amongst historians and of indicating the ways in which these new offerings fit, or fail to fit with the larger picture. Briefly, the British eugenics movement was a product of late-Victorian sensibility, but achieved the insignia of instititionalisation only in 1907, with the formation of the Eugenics Education Society which identified closely with the writings of its first president, Francis Galton (1822-1911). Galton had long been arguing that a large range of human mental and physical characters were highly heritable, and that the human race (or, at any rate, Anglo-Saxons) could be saved only by programmes of eugenic renewal which encouraged the proliferation of 'good' germ plasm and which clamped down on the spread of 'bad' germ plasm. By and large, the goodness or otherwise of an individual's germ-plasm was measured by the size of his (or her husband's) income, though the aristocracy presented a problem. The movement, in its time, attracted many distinguished persons. Its history, likewise, has attracted a great deal of attention. It is difficult to repress the thought that the magnetism of the movement owed something to its proximity to the Jungian World of the Shadow, that it fascinated because it offered a respectable way of discussing matters, such as the control of others' sexuality, that were generally seen as disreputable, as best kept in the psychic shade. So far as I know, no Jungian has tackled the eugenics movement, though Lionel Penrose once offered an unflattering Freudian analysis of sorts [1]. When we get down to the current historiography of eugenics we find essentially conventional modes of historical analysis being applied and generating conventional, though interesting problems of explanation and proper interpretation. First, there is the matter of the natural interests of the eugenics movement. Donald Mackenzie [2] has argued that eugenics was an ideology of the more 'modern'-i.e. scientifically qualified-section of the professional middle class. It was an ideology which flourished among such persons because it gave biological substance to their claims of intellectual superiority and endeared them to the ruling classes. If there were problems in society, the eugenists seemed to say, it was not the fault of capitalism, but due to the proliferation of an unfit proletariat. Medical measures of the appropriate sort, superintended by an eugenic technocracy would soon sort things out at little cost to the ruling classes. Geoffrey Searle [3], by contrast, sees eugenics as expressing the natural interests of a much tighter group of medical men and statisticians, whose careers would be furthered by the coming of eugenic policies. Other sectors of the professional middle class which stood to gain from the coming of the welfare state, Searle argues, had no particular