Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 65.djvu/532

528 which analogy makes probable, the part played by prophecy is small. Variation leads; the breeder follows. The breeder's method is to notice a desirable novelty, and to work up a stock of it, picking up other novelties in his course—for these genetic disturbances often spread—and we may rest assured the method of nature is not very different.

The popular belief that evolution, whether natural or artificial, is effected by mass-selection of impalpable differences arises from many errors which are all phases of one—imperfect analysis—though the source of the error differs with the circumstances of its exponent. When the scientific advocate professes that he has statistical proofs of the continuity of variation, he is usually availing himself of that comprehensive use of the term variation to which I have referred. Statistical indications of such continuity are commonly derived from the study, not of nascent varieties, but of the fluctuations to which all normal populations are subject. Truly varying material needs care in its collection, and if found is often sporadic or in some other way unsuitable for statistical treatment. Sometimes it happens that the two phenomena are studied together in inextricable entanglement, and the resulting impression is a blur.

But when a practical man, describing his own experience, declares that the creation of his new breed has been a very long affair, the scientist, feeling that he has found a favorable witness, puts forward this testimony as conclusive. But on cross-examination it appears that the immense period deposed to seldom goes back beyond the time of the witness's grandfather, covering, say, seventy years; more often ten, or eight, or even five years will be found to have accomplished most of the business. Next, in this period—which, if we take it at seventy years, is a mere point of time compared with the epochs of which the selectionist discourses—a momentous transformation has often been effected, not in one character but many. Good characters have been added, it may be, of form, fertility, precocity, color and other physiological attributes, undesirable qualities have been eliminated, and all sorts of defects 'rogued' out. On analysis these operations can be proved to depend on a dozen discontinuities. Be it, moreover, remembered that within this period, besides producing his mutational character and combining it with other characters (or it may be groups of characters), the breeder has been working up a stock, reproducing in quantity that quality which first caught his attention, thus converting, if you will, a phenomenon of individuals into a phenomenon of a mass, to the future mystification of the careless.

Operating among such phenomena the gross statistical method is a misleading instrument; and, applied to these intricate discriminations, the imposing correlation table into which the biometrical Procrustes fits his arrays of unanalyzed data is still no substitute for the common 6ieve of a trained judgment. For nothing but minute analysis of the