Sir Francis Galton. the founder of Eugenics, and to whom the nation 

 / owes so much, established the Law of Ancestral Inheritance. According 

 / to this law each germ, male or female, contains on an average representative 

 / particles or germinal determinants derived from the two ancestral stocks in 

 I definite proportions. Thus one quarter comes from each parent, one-sixteenth 

 | from each grand-parent, and one-sixty-fourth from each great grand-parent. 

 Thus an inheritance is not merely dual, it is multiple. Galton himself 

 recognised, however, that this law only applied to masses of people and not 

 to individual cases, for he says : " Though one half of each child may 

 be said to be derived from either parent, yet he may receive a heritage from 

 a distant progenitor that neither of his parents possessed as personal char- 

 acteristics." Again, speaking of Particulate Inheritance, he remarks; " All 

 living beings are individuals in one aspect, composite in another. We seem 

 to inherit bit by bit this element from one progenitor, that from another, 

 in the process of transmission by inheritance elements derived from the 

 same ancestor are apt to appear in large groups, just as if they had clung 

 together in the pre-embryonic stage, as perhaps they did." They form 

 what is well expressed by the word traits traits of feature and character, 

 that is to say, continuous features, not isolated points. The offspring of 

 parents possess a mosaic of inheritance bearing usually a more or less 

 similarity, yet the mosaics of character, whether bodily or mental, are 

 not in any way identical, except in the case of identical twins. Now, 

 there is a reason for this. Identical twins are the result of fertilization of 

 one ovum containing two germs of identical substance, and this leads me 

 to refer to Galton's remarkable inquiry into the History of Twins in con- 

 nection with Nature and Nurture. He found that similar twins living in a 

 different environment nevertheless remained similar in temperament and 

 character, while dissimilar twins brought up and living in the same environ- 

 ment remained dissimilar ; these dissimilar twins, however, were the product 

 of two separate ova with dissimilar germs. This shows that every germ has 

 a specific energy of its own, as manifested by a different potential 

 inheritance. 



Galton also made a statistical inquiry into good and bad tempers, and 

 as a result of this inquiry he says : "It now becomes clear enough and 

 may be taken for granted that the tempers of progenitors do not readily 

 blend in the offspring, but that some of the children take mainly after one 

 of them, some after another, but with a few threads, as it were, of 

 various ancestral tempers woven in, which occasionally manifest themselves. 

 If no other influences intervened, the tempers in the children of the same 

 family would on this account be almost as varied as those of their ancestors. 

 To recapitulate briefly, one set of influences tends to mix good and bad 

 tempers in a family at haphazard ; another tends to assimilate them, or 

 that they shall all be good or all be' bad ; a third set tends to divide each 

 family into contracted portions. These facts, ascertained by Galton, are 



