Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/246

240 If a reply has so far not been forthcoming from the writer against whom this elaborate paper was chiefly directed, this has not been either because I admitted the justice of its conclusions, or complacently accepted a damnation to which I had been consigned in very excellent company. The subject lay only on the outskirts of my own field; I could claim no originality in it; all that I had done was to sift and bring to a focus data which had hitherto been scattered, and to show their significance. At the same time I again placed the subject on my agenda paper for reconsideration. In the meanwhile, it scarcely appeared that Mr. Pearson's arguments met with much acceptance, even from those whom they most concerned.

Almost the only attempt to consider them, indeed, which I have met, is in a review of 'The Chances of Death' by Professor W. F. II. Weldon, in Natural Science. This sympathetic critic, with a biologist's instincts, clearly felt that there was something wrong with Mr. Pearson's triumphant demonstration, although as the subject lay outside his own department he was not able to indicate the chief flaws.

There is indeed one initial flaw in Professor Pearson's argument, to which Professor Weldon called attention; it could scarcely fail to attract the notice of a biologist. We are told that we must put aside 'characteristics which are themselves characteristics of sex,' like gout and color-blindness, which 'without being confined to one sex' are yet peculiarly frequent in one sex. Thus, we see, characteristics not confined to one sex may yet be characteristic of one sex, and when we seek to find what characters vary more in one sex than in the other, we must carefully leave out of account all these characters which are most clearly more prevalent in one sex. Professor Pearson thus sets out with an initial confusion which is never cleared up. His object, he tells us, is to seek such degrees of variability as are 'secondary sexual characters of human beings,' and we infer from the course of his argument that the desired characters while not confined to one sex must yet be peculiarly frequent in one sex. Yet these are precisely the group of characters ruled inadmissible at the outset! No definition of secondary sexual characters is anywhere given, or on such premises could be given.

Professor Pearson seems to assume that the conception of a