530 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



died at the early age of twenty of a dissection wound, was a 

 medical student of extraordinary promise." Erasmus may not 

 have been — probably was not — the first to perceive the fact 

 of evolution ; there can be little doubt that Buffon was before 

 him. But with Erasmus Darwin the business of making evolu- 

 tion credible passed over once and for all to the " nation of 

 shopkeepers " and the Darwin family. Not only was Erasmus 

 Darwin's enunciation of the doctrine of evolution less equivocal 

 than Buffon's (through no fault of the latter however) but 

 the sudden conversion of Lamarck, late in life, to a belief in 

 evolution followed so closely after the appearance of a French 

 translation of The Loves of the Plants by E. Darwin, as to 

 leave little room for doubt that the two events were causally 

 connected. Of Charles Darwin's participation in the task of 

 making evolution credible no more need be said. 



We must now turn to the part pla3^ed by his cousin. Galton, 

 by laying the foundation of an exact science of heredity, not 

 only took steps to fill in the most serious gap in the evolu- 

 tionary hypothesis, but sowed the seed of a tree which will 

 furnish the best, if not the only, antidote to that outbreak of 

 a priori speculation which followed the publication of the Origin. 

 Galton's vivid perception of the necessity of having things 

 surely and certainly described before any attempt was made to 

 explain them found its expression in the application of statistical 

 methods to the study of biological problems. It was not only 

 by that part of his work which laid the foundations of Biometry 

 that Galton supplemented the work of Darwin ; he also drove 

 home the applicability of our knowledge (such as it is) of 

 evolution and heredity to the fur*"' trance of human welfare 

 and thus laid the foundations of the science of Eugenics. 



Galton's greatest work in the purely scientific sphere must 

 be regarded as the foundation of the Biometric method 

 and philosophy rather than in the promulgation of the law of 

 heredity which is associated with his name. This law, which 

 was deduced from a study of Basset-hound pedigrees, will. in 

 the future be remembered, not so much as a true summary of 

 a vital process but as the expression of a first valiant attempt 

 to detect some order in the chaos of hereditary phenomena as 

 they appeared at the time. Its purely provisional nature is 

 foreshadowed by the fact that its author did not commit him- 

 self to a dogmatic statement on the question whether it was 



