n 



170 Life and Lettrrs of Fniiu'ix (kilfoii 



heritance of ac«j»nre(l characters. This position, which is clear cut aiul fairly 



easily defensible, was I hold later obscured in his mind by two influences 



a) the strong belief of Darwin in the inheritance of accjuired characters, and 



Darwin's doctrine of pangenesis. Both may be siutuned up in the single 

 influence: an intense admiration for Darwin, which enforced an exaggerated 

 respect for the authority of his judgment in individual instances. The doc- 

 trines of pangenesis and of the inheritance of acquired characters seem to 

 me to have actually retarded Galton's progress and to have rendered his 

 statement of his own views less clear than tliey otherwise would have been. 

 I tnice this influence particularly in his paper 'On Bloofl-relationship ' of 

 1872'. This memoir would, I think, have given a sharp-cut theory had it not 

 been darkened by the shadow of Darwin's views on heredity. 



We will cite in regard to this the opening words of the ' Blood-relationship': 



"I propftse in this memoir to deduce by fair re«.soning from ackiiowlcdgfyl fact«, a more 

 definite notion than now exists of the meaning of the word 'kinship.' It is my aim to analyse 

 and descrilx! the complicated connection that binds an individual, hereditarily, t4> his iwrents 

 and to his brothers and sisters, and therefore, by an extension of similar links, to his more 

 distant kinsfolk. I hope by thes«> means to set forth the doctrines of heredity in a more orderly 

 and explicit manner than is otherwise practicable. 



From the well-known circumstance) that an individual may transmit to his descendants 

 ancestral qualities that he does not hims<>lf possess, we arc ansurcil that they could not have 

 been altogether destroyed in him, but must have mnintained their existence in latent form. 

 Therefore each individual may properly l)e conceivtvl lis consisting of two parts, one of which 

 is latent and only known to us by its effects on his posterity, while the other is patent and <3on- 

 stitutes the person manifest to our senses." (p. 394.) 



Galton then proceeds to say that both these patent and latent ek-iiicnis 

 in the parent give rise to the 'structureless elements' in the offspring. Now 

 in the above sentences Galton clearly divides the 'structureless elements' 

 of the parent into those which give rise to the somatic characters of the 

 parent, and those which remain latent. At first sight we miglit suppose from 

 the above definitions that Galton did not include latent elements similar 

 to those which produced the somatic characters, but it appeal's from his 

 remarks on p. 31)8 that he really did so, for he attributes on that paj 

 special features in the off'spring corresponding to special features in t 

 parents, not to the somatic characters in the parents, but to 'latent equiva- 

 lents.' In other words, he considers that, in the bulk of cases, the corre- 

 spondence in somatic characters between parent and child is not due to any 

 influence of the somatic characters of the parent, but results from the latent 

 elements of the parent. Thus Galton's 'latent elements' constitute aljso- 

 lutely the gametic elements of more modern notation. Had Galton gone at 

 this time a stage further, and asserted that the somatic characters of the 

 parent were only an index to the latent elements in him, and not directly 

 associated with the bodily characters of the off'spring, he would have reached 

 an important principle. I hesitate to call that principle merely the con- 

 tinuity of the germ-plasm, for Galton saw a good deal further than anything 

 contained in the word 'continuity' itself He believed that both in the case 



• Proe. R. Society, Vol. XX, pp. 394-402. 



