112 A Defence of Mendel's 



But two years have gone by, and in 1900 Pearson 

 writes* that the values obtained from the Law of Ancestral 

 Heredity 



" seem to fit the observed facts fairly well in the case of 

 " blended inheritance. In other words we have a 

 "certain amount of evidence in favour of the 

 "conclusion : That whenever the sexes are equipotent, 

 " blend their characters and mate pangamously, all 

 " characters will be inherited at the same rate" 



or, again in other words, that the Law of Ancestral Heredity 

 after the glorious launch in 1898 has been home for a 

 complete refit. The top-hamper is cut down and the vessel 

 altogether more manageable ; indeed she looks trimmed 

 for most weathers. Each of the qualifications now intro- 

 duced wards off whole classes of dangers. Later on (pp. 

 487 8) Pearson recites a further list of cases regarded as 

 exceptional. " All characters will be inherited at the same 

 rate " might indeed almost be taken to cover the results in 

 Mendelian cases, though the mode by which those results 

 are arrived at is of course wholly different. 



Clearly we cannot speak of the Law of Gravitation now. 

 Our Tycho Brahe and our Kepler, with the yet more distant 

 Newton, are appropriately named as yet to comet. 



But the truth is that even in 1898 such a comparison 

 was scarcely happy. Not to mention moderns, these high 

 hopes had been finally disposed of by the work of the 

 experimental breeders such as Kolreuter, Knight, Herbert, 

 Gartner, Wichura, Godron, Naudin, and many more. To 

 have treated as non-existent the work of this group of 

 naturalists, who alone have attempted to solve the problems 



* Grammar of Science, 2nd ed. 1900, p. 480. 

 t Phil. Trans. 1900, vol. 195, A, p. 121. 



