l62 THE FOUNDATIONS OF ZOOLOGY 



than they to the mean for the race. These facts, and others like 

 them, are held to prove the existence of a principle of stability 

 independent of selection. 



In his more recent work on the patterns of human fingers he 

 says that, since it has been shown (Chapter XII.) that the character 

 of the finger prints is practically identical in Englishmen, Welsh- 

 men, Jews, negroes, and Basques, the same familiar patterns appear- 

 ing in all of them with much the same degree of frequency, and that 

 persons belonging to different classes, such as students in science 

 and students in art, farm laborers, men of culture, and the lowest 

 idiots in the London district, show no decided difference in their 

 finger prints, it seems to be proved that no sensible amount of cor- 

 relation exists between any of the patterns on the one hand and any of 

 the bodily faculties and characteristics on the other. It seems absurd, 

 therefore, to hold that, in the struggle for existence, a person with, 

 say, a loop on his right middle finger has a better chance of survival 

 or a better chance of early marriage than one with an arch. Conse- 

 quently, genera and species are here seen to be formed without the 

 slightest aid from either natural or sexual selection, and these finger 

 patterns are apparently the only peculiarity in which panmyxia, or 

 the effect of promiscuous marriage, admits of being studied on a 

 large scale. 



He says that the results of panmyxia in finger-markings cor- 

 roborate his arguments in " Natural Inheritance " and elsewhere 

 to show that "organic stability" is the primary factor by which 

 the distinctions between genera are maintained. Consequently, 

 the progress of evolution is not a smooth and uniform progres- 

 sion, but one that proceeds by jerks, through successive "sports," 

 as they are called, some of them implying considerable organic 

 changes, and each in turn being favored by natural selection. 



Galton's explanation of this specific stability is as follows : The 

 child inherits in part from the parents, in part from more remote 

 ancestors ; and since the sum of its ancestry, or, as Galton calls 

 it, the "mid-parentage," is on the average nearer than the excep- 

 tional parents to the mean for the race, the children of selected 

 parents are on the average more mediocre than their parents. 



I have tried to show that, while the child is descended from a 

 long line of ancestors, it inherits from none but the parents, and 



