Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/151

Rh and fifty miles west of these again masses of masonry are to be seen, like the others described in solidity and singularity of shape. No inscriptions have been discovered and verified, but a forty-years resident, a native of Portuguese India, who has married one of the queens of the country, says there are numerous inscriptions about Manica, for which his descriptions indicate a cuneiform character. Much may be said in favor of Consul O'Neill's theory, that the ruins are the remains of ancient Phœnician settlements.

"Hereditary Stature."—Mr.Galton has completed "to a well-denned resting-place" his investigations of hereditary stature, and has declared his conclusions in a kind of a general rule. The main problem which he had in view was to solve the question: given a man of known stature, and ignoring every other fact, what will be the probable height of his brothers, sons, nephews, grand-children, etc.; what will be their average height; and what proportion of them will probably range between any two heights we may specify? From his measurements, which were made by a method that he calls "almost absurdly simple," he found that for every unit that the stature of any group of men deviates upward or downward from the level of mediocrity (five feet eight inches and a quarter), their brothers will, on the average, deviate only two thirds of a unit, their sons one third, their nephews two ninths, and their grandsons one ninth. In remote degrees of kinship, the deviation will become zero; in other words, the distant kinsmen of the group will bear no closer likeness to them than is borne by any group of the general population taken at random. The rationale of the regression from father to son toward the level of mediocrity is due to the fact that the child's heritage comes partly from a remote and numerous ancestry, who are, on the whole, like any other sample of the past population, and therefore mediocre, and partly only from the person of the parent. Hence the parental peculiarities are transmitted in a diluted form, and the child tends to resemble, not his parents, but an ideal ancestor who is always more mediocre than they. Every one of the many series of measurements with which Mr.Galton has dealt in his inquiry has conformed with satisfactory closeness to what is called the "law of error." He knows of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as this law. "It reigns with serenity in complete self-effacement amid the wildest confusion. The huger the mob and the greater the apparent anarchy, the more perfect is its sway. Let a large sample of chaotic elements be taken and marshaled in order of their magnitudes, and then, however wildly irregular they may seem, an unsuspected and most beautiful form of regularity appears to have been present all along. Arrange the statures side by side in order of their magnitudes, and the tops of the marshaled row will form a beautifully flowing curve of invariable proportions; each man will find, as it were, a preordained niche, just at the right height to fit him, and, if the class-places and statures of any two men in the row are known, the stature that will be found at every other class-place, except toward the extreme ends, can be predicted with much precision. It will be seen, from the large values of the ratios of regression, how speedily all peculiarities that are possessed by any single individual to an exceptional extent, and which blend freely together with those of his or her spouse, tend to disappear. A breed of exceptional animals, rigorously selected and carefully isolated from admixture with others of the same race, would become shattered by even a brief period of opportunity to marry freely. It is only those breeds that blend imperfectly with others, and especially such of these as are at the same time prepotent, ... that seem to have a chance of maintaining themselves when marriages are not rigorously controlled.... It is on these grounds that I hail the appearance of every new and valuable type as a fortunate and most necessary occurrence in the forward progress of evolution."

How Inventions are evolved.—Vice-President Chanul, in his address before the Mechanical Section of the American Association, considered what might be called the evolution of inventions. Nothing, he said, is more remarkable than the multitude of minds and facts which are required for the