Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/329

Rh Furthermore much of their material was drawn from a general population in which were many different families and lines not closely related genetically. Consequently their statistical studies are of little value in discovering the physiological principles or laws of heredity. Jennings (1910) well says,

Galton's laws of regression and of ancestral inheritance are the product mainly of a lack of distinction between two absolutely diverse things, between non-inheritable fluctuations, on the one hand, and permanent genotypic differentiations, on the other.

In the case of man we have few certain tests to determine whether the differential cause of any character is hereditary or environmental, but in the case of animals and plants, where experiments may be performed on a large scale it is possible to make such tests by (1) experiments in which environment is kept as uniform as possible while the hereditary factors differ, and (2) experiments in which, in a series of cases, the hereditary factors are fairly constant while the environment differs. In this way the differential cause or causes of any character may be located in heredity, in environment, or in both.

The observational and statistical study of inheritance helped to outline the problem but did little to solve it. Certain phenomena of hereditary resemblances between ascendants and descendants were made intelligible, but there were many peculiar and apparently irregular or lawless phenomena which could not be predicted before they occurred nor explained afterwards. For example when Darwin crossed different breeds of domestic pigeons, no one of which had a trace of blue in its plumage, he sometimes obtained offspring with more or less of the blue color and markings of the wild rock pigeon from which domestic pigeons are presumably descended. He described many cases of dogs, cattle and swine, as well as many cultivated plants, in which offspring resembled distant ancestors and differed from nearer ones; such cases had long been known and were spoken of as "reversion." He observed many cases in which certain characters of one parent prevailed over corresponding characters of the other parent in the offspring, this being known as "prepotency"; but there was no satisfactory explanation of these curious phenomena. They did not come under either of Galton's laws, and their occurrence was apparently so irregular that every such case seemed to be a law unto itself.

The year 1900 marks the beginning of a new era in the study of inheritance. In the spring of that year three botanists, de Vries, Correns and Tschermak, discovered independently an important principle of