Recent Work in Heredity 87 



to do some work for himself on the subject. 

 It might sound a rather heretical remark to 

 make within academic walls, but, as a matter 

 of fact, a period of life comes to nearly every 

 student when he burns his text-books and 

 begins to think for himself, and realizes that 

 the diagrammatic life of the lecture-room is 

 not the real world of nature. With a scien- 

 tific conscience in other words, a great 

 capacity for taking pains and a determination 

 to be absolutely truthful sociological re- 

 search is one in which everyone can take part. 



The great general problem of heredity is 

 this : Given the ancestry, what are the 

 offspring likely to be ? 



Now, the characters of the offspring de- 

 pend on those of the parents ; and if we 

 knew the parents completely, we should know 

 the offspring, but in reality only a few factors 

 are knowable in the parent, and it is to the 

 remoter ancestors that we must go in search 

 of conditions which will explain the germinal 

 characters of the parents. The lecturer re- 

 minded his audience that he and his col- 

 laborators had been contemptuously called 

 ' ancestrians/ They welcomed the name 

 with pride, further asserting that they are 

 not only ancestrians, but collateralists as well, 

 for if one wants to study one's own germinal 

 capacity one must examine not only one's 

 ancestors, but one's aunts, uncles, and 

 cousins. 



