THEORIES AND CONCLUSIONS 



lacking in either of their forebears. Nor 

 did the new trees show any similarity in 

 growth to the old, a new tree in thirteen 

 years having grown six times as large of 

 girth and six times as tall as the parents had 

 grown in twenty-eight years. 



Here, as in hundreds of cases all through 

 his career, the so-called laws have been 

 absolutely disproven by the evidence accu- 

 mulating in the tests carried on upon so 

 colossal a scale. The old laws were announced 

 upon much such reasoning as this: Here 

 are ten or twenty or even a hundred men; 

 a certain number of them will yield to 

 temptation of a certain type, a certain other 

 per cent will stand fast: seventy-five of 

 a hundred children born of vicious parents 

 will grow up scoundrels, twenty-five per 

 cent saints. The instances, for illustration, 

 develop as predicted, but outside the hundred 

 examples lie ten million others, influenced, 

 as in the case of Mr. Burbank's plants, by 

 a million hereditary tendencies and a million 

 events of environment leading to totally 

 different ends, setting at naught the inferences 

 to be drawn from the hundred. 



343 



