IV 



INHERITANCE IN ANIMALS AND 



PLANTS 

 (PROFESSOR W. F. R. WELDON) 



I HAVE been asked to tell you something about the 

 study of Inheritance in Animals and in Plants, about the 

 difficulties students of Inheritance have to contend with, 

 and the special ways in which they try to meet these 

 difficulties. I shall try to tell you what I can about 

 Inheritance presently ; but before I try, I must ask 

 you to think for a while about one or two preliminary 

 matters. 



It is the first business of a scientific man to describe 

 some portion of human experience as exactly as possible. 

 It does not matter in the least what kind of experience 

 he chooses to collect ; his first business is to describe it. 

 Those differences between the methods used in the 

 different sciences which depend merely on the different 

 kinds of experience with which they deal, and upon 

 the different ways in which these kinds of experience 

 have to be collected, such differences are merely matters 

 of technical detail, and we need not discuss them to-day. 

 But there is a more important difference between the 

 different kinds of experience which students of science 

 collect, and that is, that some kinds of experience can be 

 described more exactly, and can serve as a basis for more 



