HERITAGE OF THE INDIVIDUAL 271 



4 



These so-called laws taken by and large undoubtedly 

 express general truths offspring inherit much more from 

 their immediate than from their remote ancestors; and off- 

 spring of gifted or deficient parents, judged by the average 

 standard of a mixed population, regress toward mediocrity. 

 But the ' laws ' are not particular!}^ helpful in arriving at the 

 fundamental principles involved in heredity because the data 

 upon which they are founded include indiscriminately 

 both heritable variations and modifications. The individ- 

 ual's somatic characters, which form the data, belie in many 

 cases the underlying germinal constitution what will be 

 transmitted to the progeny. Thus, for instance, experiments 

 show that when the germinal make-up of all the mem- 

 bers of a population is the same, the regression is com- 

 plete, no matter how far the particular parents may diverge 

 somatically from the population average. The somatic 

 divergence represents chiefly modifications which are not 

 inherited. Conversely, when the divergence of the parents 

 from the population average is due to characters which 

 represent expressions of their germinal constitution, then 

 there is no regression. 



C. MENDELISM 



It was reserved for Mendel to apply statistical methods to 

 facts observed in the progeny derived from carefully con- 

 trolled experiments in breeding. In other words, to substi- 

 tute for 'ancestral generations/ controlled pedigrees to look 

 forward as well as backward and thus largely to remove 

 the unknown and unknowable quantity which rendered the 

 materials of Galton somewhat delusive. Mendel's studies 

 actually were made a score of years before Galton's, but failed 

 to reach the attention of the biological world engrossed in the 

 evolution theory; in fact were never known to Darwin to 



