Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/533

Rh his ancestors. Speaking generally, the further his genealogy goes back, the more numerous and varied will his ancestors become, until they cease to differ from any equally numerous sample taken at haphazard from the race at large. Their mean stature will then be the same as that of the race; in other words, it will be mediocre." He illustrates this by comparing the result of the combination in the child of the mean stature of the race with the peculiarities of its parents to the result of pouring a uniform proportion of pure water into a vessel of wine. It dilutes the wine to a certain fraction of its original strength, whatever that strength may have been.

He then goes on to the deduction that the law of regression to the type of the race "tells heavily against the full hereditary transmission of any rare and valuable gift, as only a few of the many children would resemble the parents. The more exceptional the gift the more exceptional will be the good fortune of a parent who has a son who equals, and still more if he has a son who surpasses, him. The law is even-handed; it levies the same heavy succession tax on the transmission of badness as well as goodness. If it discourages the extravagant expectations of gifted parents that their children will inherit all their powers, it no less discountenances extravagant fears that they will inherit all their weaknesses and diseases. . . . Let it not for a moment be supposed that the figures invalidate the general doctrine that the children of a gifted pair are much more likely to be gifted than the children of a mediocre pair; what it asserts is that the ablest of the children of one gifted pair is not likely to be as gifted as the ablest of all the children of many mediocre pairs."

In his recent work on Finger Prints he says: "It is impossible not to recognize the fact so clearly illustrated by these patterns in the thumbs that natural selection has no monopoly of influence in the construction of genera, but that it could be wholly dispensed with, the internal conditions acting by themselves being sufficient. Not only is it impossible to substantiate a claim for natural selection that it is the sole agent in forming genera, but it seems, from the experience of artificial selection, that it is scarcely competent to do so by favoring mere varieties in the sense in which I understand the term. Mere varieties from a common typical center blend freely in the offspring, and the offspring of every race where statistical characters are constant necessarily tend, as I have shown, to regress toward their common typical center. A mere variety can never establish a sticking point in the forward course of evolution." He therefore holds that, while specific stability is due to inheritance from a long series of ancestors, the transmutation of species is due to the sudden appearance