P OP ULAR MIS CELL ANY. 



*39 



dred and fifty miles west of these again 

 masses of masonry are to be seen, like the 

 others described in solidity and singularity 

 of shape. No inscriptions have been dis- 

 covered and verified, but a forty-years resi- 

 dent, a native of Portuguese India, who has 

 married one of the queens of the coun- 

 try, says there are numerous inscriptions 

 about Manica, for which his descriptions 

 indicate a cuneiform character. Much may 

 be said in favor of Consul O'Neill's theory, 

 that the ruins are the remains of ancient 

 Phoenician settlements. 



" Hereditary Stature." — Mr. Galton has 

 completed " to a well-defined resting-place " 

 his investigations of hereditary stature, and 

 has declared his conclusions in a kind of a 

 general rule. The main problem which he 

 had in view was to solve the question : giv- 

 en a man of known stature, and ignoring 

 every other fact, what will be the probable 

 height of his brothers, sons, nephews, grand- 

 children, etc. ; what will be their average 

 height ; and what proportion of them will 

 probably range between any two heights 

 we may specify ? From his measurements, 

 which were made by a method that he calls 

 " almost absurdly simple," he found that for 

 every unit that the stature of any group 

 of men deviates upward or downward from 

 the level of mediocrity (five feet eight inches 

 and a quarter), their brothers will, on the 

 average, deviate only two thirds of a unit, 

 their sons one third, their nephews two 

 ninths, and their grandsons one ninth. In 

 remote degrees of kinship, the deviation 

 will become zero ; in other words, the dis- 

 tant kinsmen of the group will bear no 

 closer likeness to them than is borne by 

 any group of the general population taken 

 at random. The rationale of the regression 

 from father to son toward the level of me- 

 diocrity is due to the fact that the child's 

 heritage comes partly from a remote and 

 numerous ancestry, who are, on the whole, 

 like any other sample of the past popula- 

 tion, and therefore mediocre, and partly 

 only from the person of the parent. Hence 

 the parental peculiarities are transmitted in 

 a diluted form, and the child tends to re- 

 semble, not his parents, but an ideal ances- 

 tor who is always mora mediocre than they. 

 Every one of the many series of measure- 



ments with which Mr. Galton has dealt in 

 his inquiry has conformed with satisfactory 

 closeness to what is called the " law of er- 

 ror." He knows of scarcely anything so 

 apt to impress the imagination as this law. 

 " It reigns with serenity in complete self-ef- 

 facement amid the wildest confusion. The 

 huger the mob and the greater the appar- 

 ent anarchy, the more perfect is its sway. 

 Let a large sample of chaotic elements be 

 taken and marshaled in order of their mag- 

 nitudes, and then, however wildly irregular 

 they may seem, an unsuspected and most 

 beautiful form of regularity appears to 

 have been present all along. Arrange the 

 statures side by side in order of their mag- 

 nitudes, and the tops of the marshaled row 

 will form a beautifully flowing curve of in- 

 variable proportions ; each man will find, as 

 it were, a preordained niche, just at the right 

 height to fit him, and, if the class-places and 

 statures of any two men in the row are 

 known, the stature that will be found at 

 every other class-place, except toward the 

 extreme ends, can be predicted with much 

 precision. It will be seen, from the large 

 values of the ratios of regression, how 

 speedily all peculiarities that are possessed 

 by any single individual to an exceptional 

 extent, and which blend freely together 

 with those of his or her spouse, tend to 

 disappear. A breed of exceptional animals, 

 rigorously selected and carefully isolated 

 from admixture with others of the same 

 race, would become shattered by even a 

 brief period of opportunity to marry free- 

 ly. It is only those breeds that blend im- 

 perfectly with others, and especially such 

 of these as are at the same time prepotent, 

 . . . that seem to have a chance of main- 

 taining themselves when marriages are not 

 rigorously controlled. ... It is on these 

 grounds that I hail the appearance of every 

 new and valuable type as a fortunate and 

 most necessary occurrence in the forward 

 progress of evolution." 



Dow Inventions are evoked. — Vice- 

 President Chanul, in his address before the 

 Mechanical Section of the American Asso- 

 ciation, considered what might be called the 

 evolution of inventions. Nothing, he said, 

 is more remarkable than the multitude of 

 minds and facts which are required for the 



