THE STUDY OF INHERITANCE. 491 



his ancestors. Speaking generally, the further his genealogy goes 

 back, the more numerous and varied will his ancestors become, 

 until they cease to differ from any equally numerous sample 

 taken at haphazard from the race at large. Their mean stature 

 will then be the same as that of the race ; in other words, it will 

 be mediocre." He illustrates this by comparing the result of the 

 combination in the child of the mean stature of the race with the 

 peculiarities of its parents to the result of pouring a uniform pro- 

 portion of pure water into a vessel of wine. It dilutes the wine 

 to a certain fraction of its original strength, whatever that 

 strength may have been. 



He then goes on to the deduction that the law of regression to the 

 type of the race " tells heavily against the full hereditary trans- 

 mission of any rare and valuable gift, as only a few of the many 

 children would resemble the parents. The more exceptional the 

 gift the more exceptional will be the good fortune of a parent 

 who has a son who equals, and still more if he has a son who sur- 

 passes, him. The law is even-handed ; it levies the same heavy 

 succession tax on the transmission of badness as well as good- 

 ness. If it discourages the extravagant expectations of gifted 

 parents that their children will inherit all their powers, it no 

 less discountenances extravagant fears that they will inherit 

 all their weaknesses and diseases. . . . Let it not for a moment 

 be supposed that the figures invalidate the general doctrine 

 that the children of a gifted pair are much more likely to be 

 gifted than the children of a mediocre pair; what it asserts is 

 that the ablest of the children of one gifted pair is not likely 

 to be as gifted as the ablest of all the children of many medi- 

 ocre pairs." 



In his recent work on Finger Prints he says: "It is impos- 

 sible not to recognize the fact so clearly illustrated by these pat- 

 terns in the thumbs that natural selection has no monopoly of in- 

 fluence in the construction of genera, but that it could be wholly 

 dispensed with, the internal conditions acting by themselves being 

 sufficient. Not only is it impossible to substantiate a claim for 

 natural selection that it is the sole agent in forming genera, but 

 it seems, from the experience of artificial selection, that it is 

 scarcely competent to do so by favoring mere varieties in the sense 

 in which I understand the term. Mere varieties from a common 

 typical center blend freely in the offspring, and the offspring of 

 every race where statistical characters are constant necessarily 

 tend, as I have shown, to regress toward their common typical 

 center. A mere variety can never establish a sticking point in 

 the forward course of evolution." He therefore holds that, while 

 specific stability is due to inheritance from a long series of ances- 

 tors, the transmutation of species is due to the sudden appearance 



