VARIATION IN MAN AND WOMAN. 243 



variability fails to work out, and is in any case unnecessary, at 

 another point he falls into the opposite mistake of making no attempt 

 to discriminate when discrimination is of the first importance. As 

 we have already incidentally seen, it seems to him to be of no impor- 

 tance whether the variational tendency is tested by variations having 

 an organic congenital base, or by variations which may be merely due 

 to environmental influences during life.* To him they are all alike 

 i variations, ' and the most important are those that can most con- 

 veniently be caught in the mathematical net. Indeed he goes further 

 than this. He actually discriminates against the more organic and 

 fundamental kinds of variation. It seems to him 'erroneous' to take 

 into account congenital abnormalities of any kind when we wish to 

 test the relative variability of the sexes. In determining the varia- 

 tional tendencies of the sexes we must leave out of account the ma- 

 jority of variations ! 



The ground on which Professor Pearson rejects abnormalities is 

 that they are 'pathological,' and that it is conceivable that patho- 

 logical variation might be greater and normal variation less in the 

 same sex.f He believes that in regarding the 'normal' and the 

 'abnormal' as two altogether different and possibly opposed groups 

 of phenomena he is warranted by 'current medical science.' 



This is very far indeed from being the case. It is quite true that 

 in ordinary clinical work the physician does make such a distinction; 

 it is practically convenient. But it is not science, and if the physi- 

 cian is a genuine pathologist he admits that it is not. This is so 

 well recognized that I had thought it sufficient to quote the remark 

 of the greatest of pathologists, Virchow, to the effect that every 

 deviation from the parental type has its foundation in a pathological 

 accident a statement which Professor Pearson, on the strength of 

 what is really a verbal quibble, contemptuously puts aside as 'mean- 

 ingless.' We ought not to say the 'parental type,' he tells us, we 

 ought to say 'a type lying between the parental type and the race 

 type'; let us say it and the statement remains substantially the same, 

 so far as the question before us is concerned. % 



* It is scarcely necessary to remark that the two groups cannot be abso- 

 lutely separated. 



t This conception, Mr. Pearson remarks, seems never to have occurred to 

 me. In that shape, happily, it has not. But in ' Man and Woman ' and else- 

 where I have repeatedly called attention to the fact that, as regards various 

 psychic and nervous conditions, while gross variations are more frequent in 

 men, minor variations are more common in women. This seems to cover 

 whatever truth there may be in Mr. Pearson's supposition. 



X Virchow repeatedly emphasized the statement in question and by no 

 means always in the form that offends Professor Pearson. Thus he remarked 

 in 1894, at the annual meeting of the German Anthropological Society, that 



