Eugenics and Social Darwinism in  Stanley Waterloo’s The Story of Ab and Jack London’s Before Adam

In this essay, I examine two novels from the era of the turn of the twentieth century as parts of the intertextual apparatus of the prehistoric fiction genre and the ideological vectors of Social Darwinism and the principles of eugenics.  Social Darwinism has a particularly robust trajectory in Stanley Waterloo’s novel The Story of Ab: A Tale of the Time of the Caveman, and the principles of eugenics are strongly interrogated in Jack London’s novel Before Adam.

Not long after Charles Darwin introduced his theory of evolution in 1859, social scientists, most notably Herbert Spencer in England and William Graham Sumner in the United States, began applying the theory of natural selection to human society.  Their ideas became known as Social Darwinism, the belief that particular individuals, and by extrapolation certain classes, societies, and races, were genetically more “fit” than others and destined for success at the expense of the “unfit.”  According to Spencer and those who agreed with him, societies, classes, and races were subject to natural selection and evolved toward perfection just as species did.  The notion that the “unfit” would suffer as a result—that they had to suffer as part of the process—was to be expected and accepted since the outcome would be the overall improvement of mankind and society.  Spencerian Social Darwinism held that the attainment of social prestige and the accumulation of wealth were markers of genetic superiority.  Consequently, Spencer had a large following comprised of a conservative block of both the aristocracy, who had inherited power and wealth, and newly rich opportunists who had “made” their fortunes and acquired prestige in industry and commerce. In America, the most prominent homegrown Social Darwinist was Yale professor William Graham Sumner.  Sumner, whose philosophy agreed with Spencer’s on many points, was a vigorous and influential person whose ideas influenced subsequent generations of Social Darwinists and the development of the “science” of eugenics. 

At the same time Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner were developing and expounding on their evolutionary social theories, biologist Robert Knox, classicist William Allen, historians George Bancroft and Herbert Baxter Adams, and political scientists Francis Leiber and John W. Burgess began promoting the theory of the superiority of “races” of Teutonic origin.  They contended that the Anglo-Saxon, Nordic, and Germanic peoples were genetically “superior,” as evidenced by their “invention” of free-market capitalism, most beneficial technologies, and political liberty.  These theories also held that Jews, Slavs, Italians, and Greeks, while being racially “superior” to people with black or brown skin pigmentation, were without question inferior to Germans, English, and Scandinavians.

The ideas put forth by the proponents of Social Darwinism and Teutonic superiority are everywhere in Stanley Waterloo’s 1897 popular prehistoric novel The Story of Ab: A Tale of the Time of the Caveman.  Partly a “coming of age” story, Waterloo’s novel tells how the protagonist Ab digs a pit and catches a baby rhinoceros when only a small boy, participates in a mammoth hunt with the tribe to prove himself a man, and courts the young women from a neighboring tribe.   As Ab grows older, he helps the tribe kill a raiding saber-tooth tiger, leads his people in a great battle against an invading tribe, and becomes the leader of his band and the patriarch of a large personal family. Ab is used by the author to support his contention that there was no sharp division between the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods—that humans learned to make fine, polished tools and weapons gradually and naturally, as Ab does in the book.  During his life, Ab also invents and perfects the bow and arrow, and is the first to domesticate wolves.

In the beginning of Ab the Caveman, Waterloo goes to great pains to inform readers that the tale takes place near the banks of a stream later to be known as the Thames, which in “the Age of Stone” emptied not into the English Channel, which did not exist at the time owing to lower sea levels, but was instead a “part of a great affluent of the Rhine, the German river famous still, but then with a size and sweep worth talking of” (4).  Waterloo writes: “Then the Thames and the Elbe and the Wesser, into which tumbled a thousand smaller streams, all went to feed what is now the Rhine, and that then tremendous river held its course through dense forests and deep gorges until it reached broad plains, where the North Sea is today, and blended finally with the Northern Ocean” (4). Although on its face it may appear that Waterloo took such pains to situate his story in “correct” prehistoric geographical terms for purely “scientific” reasons, he does so in a way that also makes it clear that the narrative takes place within a greater “Teutonic” realm—the locus of the evolution of the “superior” Teutonic “races.”

One of the tenets of the theory of the superiority of “races” of Teutonic origin was that these “races” were responsible for most technological advancements throughout history.  In The Story of Ab, Waterloo extends this to include prehistory.  In an introduction to the novel, he writes:

After an at least long-continued study of the existing evidence and information relating to the Stone Ages, the conviction grew upon [Waterloo] that the mysterious gap supposed by scientific teachers to divide Paleolithic from Neolithic man never existed.  No convulsion of nature, no new race of human beings is needed to explain the difference between the relics of Paleolithic and Neolithic strugglers.  Growth, experiment, adaptation, discovery, inevitable in man, sufficiently account for all the relatively swift changes from one form of primitive life to another more advanced, from the time of chipped to that of polished implements. Man has been, from the beginning, under the never-resting, never-hastening forces of evolution. (v-vi)

In The Story of Ab, the demonstrably fitter Ab’s invention of the bow and arrow and his innovation of polishing stone implements, hallmarks of the change from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, took place within the short span of one man’s lifetime.  This is “swift change” indeed, and is illustrative, superficially, of Waterloo’s avowed belief that human ingenuity and creatively are enough to solve, in an imaginative way, one of the most perplexing archaeological quandaries of the period.  Speculation on how much credence Waterloo expects readers to give to this theory, and its fictive “proofs,” would be interesting.  More to the point of this essay is how Waterloo explicitly ties his imaginative work to contemporaneous scientific knowledge and theories, and how this was an attempt to bolster the belief in Teutonic “superiority.”

In the beginning of the book, Waterloo assures readers that “in this work the author has been cordially assisted by some of the ablest searchers of two continents into the life history of prehistoric times” (v).  Waterloo wants readers to appreciate that his novel is based in “accepted theories and scientific research” (v), with the one exception of his theory of swift technological change.  By stressing the “scientific” validity of his fiction in explicitly Darwinian evolutionary and generally accepted palaeoanthropological and archeological terms, Waterloo appeals to their popularly authoritarian theories.  The theories he expounds implicitly, those of Social Darwinism and Teutonic “superiority,” are thereby given the cachet of credence through this association.

Waterloo’s single deviation from the accepted theories and scientific research of the time, his postulation that the inexplicable gap between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic was explicable in terms of “growth, experiment, adaptation, discovery” (vi) inherent in humanity, had wider implications than the explanation of the swift change from “the time of chipped stone to that of polished stone” in the dim past.  Implied in Waterloo’s fictive theory was the reassurance that the swift changes experienced in the era of the turn of the century, and the concomitant social concerns wrought by such swift changes, were not new in kind even if they were in scope.  The Story of Ab can therefore be read as an attempt to confirm that these kinds of things had happened before as the result of technological advances made by the superior Teutonic “races,” which races had time and again discovered ways to solve these problems through isolation, domination, violence, and their genetically “superior” morals and intellect.

The climax of the The Story of Ab is a celebration of the superiority of the genetically fitter Ab and his people, labeled by Waterloo the “Western Cave Men,” as demonstrated by the successful defense of their home territory from invasion by the “Eastern Cave Men.”  Ab and the Western Cave Men have moved into “The Fire Country,” a place discovered by Ab and subsequently colonized by him, his family, and their kith and kin.  The Fire Country is a natural fortress–a valley almost completely encircled by a natural wall of flame, created by natural gas leaking from a great crack in the ground ignited by lightning, and by sheer rock outcroppings.  The Fire Country is well stocked with fresh water and plenty of the other resources needed by the Western Cave Men.

In the chapter “The Battle of the Barriers,” the more numerous Eastern Cave Men, led by their swarthy leader “Boarface,” contest the possession of this most felicitous place by Ab and the Western Cave Men (264-286).  The outcome of the battle is in doubt more than once, but Ab and his Western Cave Men carry the day through superior tactics and technology by using the natural barriers in the most efficient ways, and because they possess more and know how to use more and deadlier weapons than their enemy.  After the battle, the Western Cave Men also demonstrate their “moral superiority” by adopting the prisoners they have taken instead of killing them.  Waterloo gives us this “insight” into the reasoning of both factions on this forced assimilation:

There was a council that night between Ab and his friends and, the easiest way of disposing of the prisoners in the cave, it was proposed to block the entrance and allow the miserable losers in battle to there starve at their leisure.  But the thoughtful Old Mok [Ab’s mentor] took Ab aside and said:

“Why not let them live and work for us?  They will do as you say.  This is the place they wanted.  They can stay and make us stronger.”

And Ab saw the reason of all of this and the hungry, imprisoned men were given the alternative of death or obedient companionship.  They did not hesitate long.  The warmth of the valley and its other advantages were what they had come for and they had no narrow views outside of the food and fuel question.  The valley was good.  They accepted Ab’s authority and came out and fed and, with their wives and children, who were sent for, became of the valley people. (286) 

In ending his narrative in this way, Waterloo imaginatively addresses, and answers in a wish-fulfilling way, contemporary questions concerned with the new immigrants from the East and the perceived threat their “invasion” posed to those already established in America.  The threat of invasion of swarthy invaders from the East is real and desperate, but the “superior” ones ensconced in the naturally-bastioned America of the West will win.  Ab and the Western Cave Men can afford to be magnanimous after victory, but only if the “miserable losers” accept the authority of their conquerors, adopt the conquerors’ ways for themselves and their families, and agree to work for their demonstrably fitter and therefore superior betters. 

After the Battle of the Barriers at the end of the narrative, Waterloo presents Ab and his mate Lightfoot as a kind of Nordic Adam and Eve.  He writes: “Strong was primitive man; adroit, patient and faithful was primitive woman; he, the strongest, she the fairest and cleverest of the time, could protect their offspring, breed and care for great children of similar powers and so insure a lasting race.” Battered but triumphant, Ab and Lightfoot have survived to old age, becoming the “very great” grandparents of a western European race who would hold their ground against even the incursions of militant Aryan invaders, making the Aryan men “serfs” and Aryan women “mothers”—a “blending good for each of the two forces” (290).  The descendents of Ab and Lightfoot, the strongest and fairest and cleverest, retain racial purity from the Paleolithic to historic times.  They progress in the face of great natural cataclysms to go from wielding “the smoothed stone weapons” of Ab’s conception to “the bronze axes” as they diverge “in many branches of contentious defenders and invaders, to become Iberian and Gaul and Celt and Saxon, to fight family against family, and to commingle again in these later times” (290). 

In these later times, the “good blue blood” of Ab and Lightfoot remains potent, for among their descendents are numbered these individuals:

[. . .] a woman, cultured, very beautiful and wise in woman’s way and among the fairest and the best of all the earth can produce [. . .] a rugged man, gentle as resolute and noble [who] became the enshrined hero of a vast republic, when he struck from slave limbs the shackles of four million people [. . .] an old man vigorous in his octogenarianism, a power, though out of power, a figure to be a monument in personal history, a great man

[. . . ] one who has bound the nations together in sympathy for Les Miserables of the earth [. . .] a bald headed giant in cavalry boots, one who has dictated arbitrarily, as premier, the policy of an empire he has largely made. (291)

Ab and Lightfoot’s success—their survival in a hostile environment—thus leads directly, if remotely, to the birth and successes of the “Ideal Woman” and “Super Men” such as, in a disturbingly oblique way, Abraham Lincoln and Victor Hugo, and, not so tangentially, Otto Von Bismarck.  Ab and Lightfoot were, in eugenic terms, a genetically ideal couple deserving of privileged reproductive status.

By the early years of the twentieth century, the main point of Darwin’s theory of evolution had been utterly altered by the influences of Social Darwinism, race theorists, and an incomplete understanding of the principles of genetics from its original focus on the origin of species to the pseudo-science of “eugenics,” a term coined by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton in 1883.  Galton was a mathematician and scientist who was greatly impressed and influenced by his older cousin’s theoretical work and determined to expand upon it.  His contribution, which he called “eugenics” from a Greek root meaning “well born,” was the conception of a science that would improve the human species giving, in his words quoted in Pat Shipman’s book The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use and Abuse of Science, “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable” (111). 

Galton, unlike Spencer and Sumner, rejected the idea that the accumulation of wealth and the attainment of social prestige by individuals were prima facie indicators of genetic superiority.  Galton’s studies of prominent achievers, including poets, scientists, military men, over a two-hundred-year period led him to conclude that certain families were disproportionately disposed to produce such productive and superior individuals, and therefore that such things as creativity, character, and intelligence were as hereditary as height, eye color, and the size and shape of noses.  He then concluded, as Pat Shipman notes, that the most logical thing to do to improve the human species was to selectively breed a “highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations” (114).  Galton maintained that the differences in human success reflected the quality of the breeding stock, and proposed that the British government should become involved by scrutinizing the breeding populace for hereditary value, identifying those with exceptional genetic merit, and then sponsoring and celebrating their marriages.

In America, the other side of the eugenics coin, that genetically “defective” individuals should not be allowed to breed, was made “apparent” by the work of Richard Dugdale, who published his study of the Jukes family in 1877.  The Jukes family had very little to be proud of, being comprised, according to Dugdale, mostly of prostitutes, criminals, beggars, and blackguards of every stripe for more than seven generations, starting with one thoroughly genetically “unfit” couple who lived in upstate New York.  Dugdale’s study of the Jukes family reinforced the worst suspicions about undesirables in American society—that many social ills had a genetic, not an environmental, basis.  The Jukes study was still being cited in 1916.  In that year, the American Eugenics Society published a pamphlet that estimated that the effects of allowing unchecked breeding of the original Jukeses had cost the State of New York about $2,000,000 up to that time.  According to historian Daniel J. Kevles, the anonymous author of the pamphlet estimated that the cost of segregating the original Jukeses from the rest of society for life, and thereby obviating the problems wrought by their genetically flawed offspring, would have been about $25,000, and the cost of sterilizing the original Jukeses would have been a bargain at $150 (91).

As was Social Darwinism, eugenics was rooted in nineteenth-century confusion of national identities with race and nourished by the unease caused by the perplexing collection of social, political, economic, and cultural changes that occurred in the era of the turn of the twentieth century. Eugenics enjoyed a reputation as a potent, objective science that pointed the way to countering the perceived threats posed by these changes.  The man most credited with bringing Eugenics to America from Britain, where it had gained a stronghold under the auspices of Galton and his protégé Karl Pearson, was the Harvard-trained biologist Charles Davenport.  Davenport did much to develop the “science” of eugenics.  He worked to capture and maintain hereditary information on individuals, lobby for eugenics-based legislation, and popularize eugenics through the auspices of the Eugenics Record Office, which was financed in large part by the extremely wealthy Mrs. E. H. Harriman.  Davenport was not alone, however.  For example, at the same time Davenport was active, and with his collaboration, the American Breeders Association (ABA) devoted itself to investigating eugenics issues.  The ABA formed a committee that focused on the presumed hereditary differences between human races and actively popularized the themes of selective breeding of superior stock, the biological threat of “inferior types,” and the need for recording and controlling human heredity.  One of the strongest supporters, and financial backers, of the eugenics movement was cereal magnate J. H. Kellogg, who founded the Race Betterment Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1906. 

Also in 1906, the same year Kellogg created the Race Betterment Foundation, American novelist and short story writer Jack London entered the eugenics discourse when he began the serialized publication of his novel Before Adam. London, who would author over fifty books of fiction and non-fiction in his short life, is known today for his romantic tales of elemental struggles for survival, including Call of the Wild and White Fang.  Before Adam is much different from those tales; London presented this narrative as the retelling of the dream memories of the fictional writer’s mid-Pleistocene ancestor, a member of a “race” without fire, language, or much social organization. Throughout the book, the modern narrator struggles with the dilemma of imparting his impressions of the life of a being not quite human as seen through the “dream eyes” of his ancestor and analyzed by him. 

Before Adam has much in common with Stanley Waterloo’s The Story of Ab, published in 1897.  Waterloo, in fact, accused London of plagiarizing his work.  Like The Story of Ab, Before Adam takes place in the far past, although London is much less specific about what part of the past than Waterloo is in his tale.  Before Adam also adheres to the Social Darwinian concept of the “survival of the fittest” of individuals, classes, societies, and “races,” as does The Story of Ab.  However, Before Adam is unlike The Story of Ab in many ways.  There is no emphasis on Teutonic “superiority,” for example; London locates his story somewhere in Africa.  Moreover, London’s narrative interrogates many of the by then popular “principles” of eugenic racism.

The most profound difference between London’s book and Waterloo’s is that the “hero” in London’s tale is not a member of a clearly superior, and therefore dominant, “race.”  There are three distinct races in Before Adam.  At the top of the racial hierarchy are the “Fire People.”  The Fire People are the most physically and culturally “advanced” of the three “races”; they look and act most like modern humans.  They are not as hairy as the other two races.  They have smaller heads, are less stooped, have shorter arms, and have smaller teeth than the other two.  They live in caves, wear skins, make fires, use the bow and arrow, have a relatively advanced language, and are well organized and able to cooperate.  The lowest “race” in Before Adam is the “Tree People.”  The Tree People resemble apes more than the other two races in the novel, but have no hair on their faces, palms, or the soles of their feet.  They live in trees, have no technology, and possess only a rudimentary language and social organization.  The third “race” in Before Adam is the “Folk.”  The Folk look less like modern humans than the Fire People do and less like apes than the Tree People do.  Like the Tree people, they use a basic form of vocalized communication, although they do have a larger vocabulary than the Tree People.  Unlike the Tree People, the Folk have some technology—sticks and stones used for weapons, gourds used to carry water.  Like the Fire People, most of the Folk live in caves, but they lack the Fire People’s social organization and are therefore less able to cooperate and act in coordinated activities such as hunting and warfare. 

These “racial” differences seem to be profound, particularly the differences that separate the Fire People from the other two.  However, London seems to suggest that even these differences may not be so great as they seem, at least in “genetic” terms.  “Certainly,” the modern narrator asserts in the novel, “all three kinds were related, and not so remotely at that” (163).  What London appears to be arguing is that the “races” are differentiated by something that is not so much genetically “inheritable” as it is culturally determined, and this inquiry is central to the main character’s life as interpreted by the modern narrator.

The modern narrator calls the prehistoric protagonist in Before Adam by the name of “Big-Tooth” since he has unusually large canines even for a member of his “race.”  Big-Tooth is a member of the Folk.  The story of Bigfoot’s coming of age in Before Adam, unlike Ab’s in The Tale of Ab, is one of continued sorrow and misfortune at the hands of cruel and merciless members of his own “race” and of the other two.  Big-Tooth is at first persecuted by his stepfather, the “Chatterer,” and thereafter terrorized by the atavistic brutal bully of the Folk, “Red-Eye, who really should abide with the Tree People, according to the modern narrator, and who in the end does.  Big Tooth also must occasionally dodge the arrows of Fire People hunting parties, who apparently have a taste for the Folk.  Unlike Ab in Waterloo’s novel, Big-Tooth accomplishes no great things in his life.  Big-Tooth’s one attempt to contribute to what the modern narrator might consider progress is unsuccessful; when Big-Tooth brings home a wolf cub to play with, his gluttonous friend and ally “Lop-Ear” kills and eats it before the creature can bond with them.  Unlike Ab, Big-Tooth is unable to claim that he domesticated the dog (98-110).

Big-Tooth’s low achievement rate is typical of the Folk, according to the modern narrator, who more than once bemoans the Folk’s apparent lack of initiative compared to the Fire People.  The modern narrator speaks of these perceived shortcomings in a muddled way, confusing the existence of his distant ancestor’s “we,” with his own: “We were inconsecutive, illogical, and inconsequential.  We had no steadfastness of purpose, and it was here that the Fire People were ahead of us.  They possessed all these things of which we possessed so little” (95).  The Fire People are “ahead” of the Folk because they possessed advanced skills and technologies acquired through time, through the slow transmission of culture, rather than through genetic inheritance.  The narrator recognizes this, although he is mortified by the snail’s pace of it, often wishing that such changes had come faster.  For example, he notes that the two technical innovations during Big-Tooth’s entire lifetime were the use of gourds by an old man of the Folk for carrying water and the development of a very rude leaf basket by some of the Folk women—which might have led to big things but did not.  He observes:

Possibly in ten or twenty generations we might have worked up to the weaving of baskets.  And of this, one thing is sure: if once we wove withes into baskets, the next and inevitable step would have been the weaving of cloth.  Clothes would have followed, and with covering our nakedness would have come modesty.

 Thus was momentum gained in the Younger World.  But we were without this momentum.  We were just getting started, and we could not go far in a single generation.  We were without weapons, without fire, and in the raw beginnings of speech.  The device of writing lay so far in the future that I am appalled when I think of it. (97)

That the Folk were at a disadvantage because they were technologically and socially “behind” the Fire People plays a key role in the narrative, thereby expressing a major theme of Social Darwinism.  In fact, near the end of the narrative the Fire People attack and, because of their superior technologies and ability to cooperate and coordinate their assault, nearly annihilate The Folk.  They want The Folk’s caves.  This is a reversal of what happens at the end of The Story of Ab, when Ab and his band defeat invaders bent on taking their homes, but the message appears to be the same: the technologically and socially “fittest” win.  However, the defeat and near genocide of The Folk in Before Adam is not the end of the story, just as the “Battle of the Barriers” is not the end of the story in the Story of Ab.

When the Fire People kill all but a few of The Folk, the survivors who elude the onslaught run away and survive in the best manner they can.  Big-Tooth is aided in his escape from the Fire People by his future mate, the indomitable and enigmatic “Swift One.”  The Swift One is a female who lives with none of the three “races.”  Big-Tooth first came across her living alone in the forest when he and his friend Lop-Ear suffered through a traveling exile forced by the vile Red-Eye.  The Swift One, as her name implies, is very fleet on both the ground and in the trees–which is a unique combination since all the “races” excel in one but not the other.  She also exhibits extraordinary physical attributes that lead the modern narrator to speculate that she is of mixed race—the offspring of a Fire Person and one of The Folk.  Such mixes were, we learn from the modern narrator, “[. . . ] not common, still they did occur, and I have seen the proof of them with mine own eyes, even to the extent of members of [The Folk] turning renegade and going to live with the Tree People” (135).  It is in the character of the Swift One that London challenges the principles of eugenics most.

According to most eugenicists in the first part of the twentieth century, the “cross-breeding” of races was, genetically speaking, a bad idea.  In his 1916 book Being Well-Born: An introduction to Heredity and Eugenics, Michael F. Guyer quoted Charles Davenport as having this to say about miscegenation:

 Not only physical but also mental and temperamental incompatibilities may be the consequence of hybridization.  For example, one often sees in mulattoes an ambition and push combined with the intellectual inadequacy which makes the unhappy hybrid dissatisfied with his lot and a nuisance to others.

To sum up, then, miscegenation commonly spells disharmony —disharmony of physical, mental and temperamental qualities and this means also disharmony with environment.  A hybridized people are a badly put together people and a dissatisfied, restless, ineffectual people (408).

The Swift One in Before Adam does exhibit some environmental disharmony–she is unable to live with any of the three “races.”  However, there is nothing about her that suggests “disharmonized” physical, mental, or temperamental qualities.  She is, in fact, characterized as mild and gentle, wise and discreet, and of “most pleasing appearance”–the antithesis of the eugenicist’s “hybridized” person (134).

At the end of Before Adam, London leaves us with a vision of Big-Tooth and the Swift One living in a cave in isolation from all three races of the “Younger World”–a place where they quietly raise a family in apparent peace.  Big-Tooth and the Swift One are not depicted as a kind of Adam and Eve, unlike Ab and Lightfoot in The Story of Ab, and there are no claims that they are the ancestors of later, great people.  Their descendant, the modern narrator, does wonder about how he came to be, however.  He asks: “Were the Folk, before their destruction, in the process of becoming men?  And did I and mine carry through this process?  On the other hand, may not some descendant of mine have gone in to the Fire People and become one of them?” (241). The answers to these questions, easily answered in an imaginative work, as they are in Waterloo’s, go unanswered in Before Adam.  Perhaps for London the answers—at least the ones being provided by much of the “science” of the period—were not as satisfying as continued questioning.  Many were not inclined to interrogate the interrogators, however, and the answers they found in Social Darwinism and eugenics were, tragically, enough.

John R. Hensley

Winston Churchill Memorial and Library

Westminster College

Fulton, Missouri

Works Cited

Angenou, Marc, and Nadia Khouri. “An International Bibliography of Prehistoric Fiction,” Science-Fiction Studies  Mar. 1981: 38-53.

Grant, Madison.  The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Bias of European History, 4^th ed. New York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923.

Guyer, Michael F.  Being Well-Born : An introduction to Heredity and Eugenics.  Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1916.

Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics: Eugenics and the Uses of Human Heredity.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.

Kuhl, Stefan. The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. New York: Oxford U P, 1994.

London, Jack.  Before Adam. Commemorative ed.  Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000.

Shipman, Pat.  The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use and Abuse of Science.  New York, Simon and Schuster, 1994.

Stableford, Brian. “Origins of Man.” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Ed. John Clute and Peter Nicholls. New York: St. Martins, 1993.

Waterloo, Stanley. The Story of Ab:  A Tale from the Time of the Caveman. New York: Doubleday, Doran and Co, 1925.