HEREDITY AND RADIUM AT DUBLIN 183 



number of legs or tails. The fact has long troubled breeders, 

 and not even local superstition has a theory. 



Professor Wilson's argument, which a map marked with lines 

 of migration made very persuasive, suggests that the sciences 

 and arts might help each other much more than they do. How 

 often the doctor would help the historian ! What a number of 

 critical events have depended on nothing more nor less than a 

 state of health ! A Prime Minister resigns because he cannot 

 sleep, a Napoleon misses the critical point in a battle because 

 the cancerous doom of his family begins to exert its influence. 

 An admirable example briefly alluded to at one of the Dublin 

 debates was provided by a paper published last year, in which it 

 was argued that the decay of Greek and Roman civilisations was 

 profoundly affected by the introduction of malaria. Historians 

 are only just beginning to appreciate even archaeology, the 

 disregard of which ruined the value of Grote, and indeed 

 most of the older historians, before the Evanses and Mr. 

 Hogarth began to dig up lumps of concrete history that knocked 

 down the most carefully erected theories. How much more 

 accurate and valuable, and indeed readable, their history would 

 be if they took evidence also from biology and physiology, or 

 even physics ! After all, was not Halley's Comet, about which 

 Mr. Turner talked pleasantly at an evening lecture, directly 

 concerned with the conquest of England in 1066? What war its 

 arrival in 19 10 will entail, Mr. Turner did not say. 



Has Mendelism anything to say on the question of in- 

 breeding? This question is suggested by the accidental fact 

 that Professor Wilson passed direct from his history of cattle as 

 tested by Mendelian inheritance to the pedigree of certain 

 famous animals. Every one acquainted with breeding knows 

 that our early herds were made and kept pure by very close in- 

 breeding. Bakewell travelled all over England and perhaps the 

 Netherlands to find an animal as good as his own. When he 

 failed he inbred, on the theory that whatever happened you must 

 breed from the very best : fortes creantur fortibus ct bonis. But 

 perhaps none of his audience had quite realised the extent of the 

 inbreeding. The most famous of all Aberdeen Angus cattle — 

 and it is pertinent to remember that the animal had stamina and 

 won prizes at eleven years old — issued from such close in- 

 breeding that the whole of his ancestry over seven generations, 

 giving a possible total of 128 ancestors, numbered only five. 



