RACIAL AND INDIVIDUAL CHARACTERS 213 



doubt as to alternative transmission, but a failure to con- 

 sider other evidence in an unbiassed manner seems to have 

 led some of the Mendelians into a narrow interpretation of 

 the results of their experiments which is incompatible with 

 other classes of facts. 



The work of the biometricians has proved beyond a 

 doubt that variations occur around a racial mean in so 

 regular a manner that a curve will represent the differ- 

 ences of any given character in the various individuals 

 of a race in any given time. 1 They have also shown that 

 the offspring of parents, which diverge considerably from 

 the racial mean in any character, tend to revert to the 

 mean. 



We have seen that there is a provision in the mode of 

 cell division, in the production of gametes, and in the 

 process of fertilisation, for the transmission of characters 

 in an alternative manner ; but we have also seen that, 

 according to the evidence at our disposal, only individual 

 characters can be thus transmitted. Racial characters must 

 be transmitted in a different way. It is quite obvious that 

 all characters must be transmitted through the single cell, 

 the fertilised ovum. How this happens in the case of the 

 individual characters is easy to see, for we have individual 

 entities, the chromosomes, that are distributed from cell 

 generation to cell generation, from parents to offspring, in 

 a manner that coincides exactly with the behaviour of the 

 individual characters. The evidence with regard to what 

 part of the cell bears the racial characters is conflicting. 

 It may very likely be that the whole protoplasm of the cell 

 has this power. 



Though there are instances of individual characters in 

 process of becoming racial characters, and there is but little 

 doubt as to the broad lines of the process of transformation, 

 we have no evidence as to the cell phenomena connected 

 with this change. It is of course possible to speculate. It 

 is evident that if an individual character is represented in 



1 See p. 99. 



