SOCIAL ASPECTS OP HEREDITY 5^3 



is capable of statistical proof, and it follows from the broad fact 

 that each parental contribution is a mosaic of inheritance, 

 which, except in cases of very careful selection (for good or ill), 

 must eventually be traced to a crowd of ancestors representing 

 the average mediocrity of the stock. 



Thus we have light thrown on the familiar facts that children 

 of exceptionally gifted pairs are often commonplace, and that 

 children of worse than commonplace parents are often very 

 fair samples of the breed. More generally, we see, as Mr. Galton 

 s.ays, that there is a general and inevitable levelling- up and 

 levelling- down, that a society biologically considered tends to 

 move like a great fraternity. Just as the " Hereditary Genius " 

 studies of Mr. Galton gave us a biological basis for pride of 

 race and a respect for true aristocracy, so his Filial Regression 

 formula is a message to democracy. 



The facts of inheritance acquire profound sociological signifi- 

 cance when we inquire into the relative rates of fertility in 

 different sections of a population, and into the probabilities 

 of the production of highly endowed types in these different 

 sections. It seems to us that one of the most suggestive of 

 biological contributions to sociology is that famous " Huxley 

 Lecture " in which Mr. Galton indicated some of the probable 

 practical corollaries of his statistical laws. 



Man is a slowly varying organism, and he is peculiarly liable 

 to have his inborn nature concealed by a veneer due to nurture, 

 but there is no ignoring the fact that there are great differences 

 in quality and quantity of hereditary endowment. As was long 

 ago expressed in immortal parable, there are those who have 

 ten talents, those who have five, and those who have only one. 



Now, the differences in hereditary endowment of strength 

 or intelligence, of stature or longevity, of fertility or social dis- 

 position, have a certain regularity of distribution, so far as we 

 can measure them at all. They conform to what is called the 

 Normal Law of Frequency, which is always illustrated when 



