SKETCH OF FRANCIS G ALT ON. u g 



the laws of blood-relationship, communicated in a paper to the Royal 

 Society in June, 1872 ; and the inquiries which are represented in his 

 books on " Hereditary Genius, its Laws and Consequences " (1869) ; 

 "English Men of Science ; their Nature and Nurture" (1874) ; and 

 "Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development" (1883). 



In the lecture on " Blood-Relationship " he sought to analyze and 

 describe the complicated relation that binds an individual, hereditarily, 

 to his parents and to his brothers, and therefore, by an extension of 

 similar links, to his more distant kinsfolk. By these means he hoped 

 to set forth the doctrines of heredity in a more orderly and explicit 

 manner than was otherwise practicable. " From the well-known cir- 

 cumstance," he said, " that an individual may transmit to his descend- 

 ants ancestral qualities which he does not himself possess, we are 

 assured that they could not have been altogether destroyed in him, 

 but must have maintained their existence in a latent form. Therefore 

 each individual may properly be conceived as consisting of two parts, 

 one of which is latent and only known to us by its effects on his pos- 

 terity, while the other is patent and constitutes the person manifest to 

 our senses. The adjacent, and, in a broad sense, separate lines of 

 growth in which the patent and latent elements are situated, diverge 

 from a common group and converge to a common contribution, be- 

 cause they were both evolved out of elements contained in a structure- 

 less ovum, and they jointly contribute the elements which form the 

 structureless ova of their offspring. . . . The observed facts of rever- 

 sion enable us to prove that the latent elements must be greatly more 

 varied than those that are personal or patent." An elaboration of this 

 view, and a more detailed examination of the phenomena caused the 

 author " to be impressed with the fallacy of reckoning inheritance in 

 the usual way, from parents to offspring, using those words in their 

 popular sense of visible personalities. The span of the true hereditary 

 link connects, not the parent with the offspring, but the primary ele- 

 ments of the two, such as they existed in the newly impregnated ova 

 whence they were respectively developed." In conclusion, he recorded 

 as one result of the investigation, a very clear showing that "large 

 variation in individuals from their parents is not incompatible with 

 the strict doctrine of heredity, but is a consequence of it wherever the 

 breed is impure. I am desirous of applying these considerations to 

 the intellectual and moral gifts of the human race, which is more 

 mongrelized than that of any other domesticated animal. It has been 

 thought by some that the fact of children showing marked individual 

 variation in ability from that of their parents is a proof that intellectual 

 and moral gifts are not strictly transmitted by inheritance. My argu- 

 ments lead to exactly the opposite result. I show that their great indi- 

 vidual variation is a necessity under present conditions, and I maintain 

 that results derived from large averages are all that can be required, 

 and all we could expect to obtain, to prove that intellectual and moral 



