Manchester Me JHoirs, Vol. I. (1906), No. H. 27 



a meaning he must make this clear. If he is referring to 

 the former, he is declaring for the Law of Contribution ; 

 if to the latter, for the Law of Ancestral Inheritance. 



When the Mendelian says that ancestry does not 

 make a difference, he is not denying the validity of the 

 Law of Ancestral Inheritance but the Law of Diminishing 

 Individual Contribution. At least I think this is the 

 correct attitude. 



And I cannot bring myself to agree with Bateson 

 when he says that facts once describeable by Mendel's 

 Law are permanently removed from the operation [sic] of 

 the Law of Ancestral Inheritance, unless all that he means 

 by this statement is that when we have gained this deeper 

 knowledge of certain hereditary phenomena their further 

 treatment by the method of the correlation table will 

 not increase our knowledge of them. I should like to 

 think that this is all he means : but his writings prevent 

 me : for he imputes to upholders of Pearson's Law belief 

 in the Law of Contribution :* yet on the next page he 

 shews that he has not confused the two, by saying that 

 the Law of Ancestral Heredity ''does not directly attempt 

 to give any account of the distribution of the heritage aJiiong 

 the gametes of any one individual." I do not know 

 whether Bateson still holds that Mendel's Law is 

 antagonistic to the Law of Ancestral Inheritance as well 

 as to the Law of Contribution. If he does, I do not 

 understand on what grounds. Pearson has investigated 

 the relation between the two and concludes " that in the 

 theory of the pure gamete there is nothing in essential 

 opposition to the broad features of linear regression, skew 

 distribution, the geometric law of ancestral correlation, etc. 

 of the biometric description of inheritance in populations.''^ 



* Bateson, :02, p. 21, second half, 

 t Pearson, '.O'^b, p. 86. 



