Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/259

Rh 'Secondary sexual characters' remain, in his hands, like variation, undefined.

4. All 'abnormalities' are added to the material rejected as unsuitable for investigation, on the ground that they are 'pathological.' It has been easy to show that this notion cannot be maintained, and that in his pious horror of 'pseudo-scientific superstitions' Professor Pearson here lays himself open to retort. Anomalies are not pathological, except in the sense of Virchow, who regarded pathology as simply the science of anomalies. Moreover, scientific pathologists do not admit that even diseases can be regarded as involving any new or different laws. Morbid as well as normal phenomena alike furnish proper material, if intelligently used, for the investigation of this question.

5. Professor Pearson decides that differences in size furnish the best measure of the variability of the sexes. In reaching this decision he makes no reference to the fact that the probabilities accumulated during a century tended to discredit this group of evidence for the purposes he had in view.

6. If, however, we put aside those probabilities which tend to render this evidence tainted, so far as the object of Professor Pearson's special argument is concerned, we still find that the results he reaches are precisely the results we should expect if the position he assails is sound. That is to say that at birth, before the results of the assumed selective action of the pelvis have yet been fully shown, there is greater variability of the males, while later, as a result of that selection, there is a tendency to equality in sexual variability.

7. The net outcome of Professor Pearson's paper is thus found to be a confirmation of that very doctrine of the greater variational tendency of the male which he set out to prove to be 'either a dogma or a superstition.'

It may be as well to state, finally, that nothing I have said can be construed as an attempt to disparage those 'biometrical' methods of advancing biology of which Professor Pearson is to-day the most brilliant and conspicuous champion. I am not competent to judge of the mathematical validity of such methods, but so far as I am able to follow them I gladly recognize that they constitute a very valuable instrument for biological progress. I say nothing against the instrument: I merely point out that, on this occasion, the results obtained by its application have been wrongly interpreted.