DESCENT WITH MODIFICATION 



159 



as regression or the pull of the ancestry. The reason of it is 

 that some of these short parents are children of tall people, and 

 in these cases the height is helped out by the stature of the 

 grandparent. Also, some of the extremely tall parents were 

 themselves children of short grandparents, all of which lessens 

 greatly their powers of transmitting as much stature as they 

 themselves possess. 



Some offspring better and some worse than their parents. 

 A careful study of this table shows that whatever the parent, 

 whether mediocre, inferior, or exceptional, the offspring will 

 take the form of a distribution extending both ways from a 

 mean or mode, said mean or mode being not far from that of 

 the parent. If the parent is above the average of the race, the 

 majority of the offspring will be below the parent ; if, however, 

 the parent is below the average, then the majority of the off- 

 spring will be better than their parents. 



The exceptional parent and his offspring. There is a foolish 

 notion that preachers' sons are especially likely to go wild. Let 

 us analyze this problem in the light of this table. In the first 

 place, admitting the parent to be exceptional, what are the 

 chances of the offspring being also exceptional } This is an 

 important question, — indeed, one of the most important in 

 all studies in heredity. 



Substituting general excellence in place of stature for the 

 moment, let us refer to the table. We see at once that an excep- 

 tional parent, or even an exceptional midparent, which means 

 two exceptional parents, is by no means certain of exceptional 

 offspring, unless, indeed, the exceptional quality is of many 

 generations standing. Take the case of the 70. 5 -inch parents, 

 — two inches above the average. Of their entire offspring (68), 

 I was almost a dwarf, 5 1 were shorter than their parents, and 

 7 were distinctly below the average of the race. This is one 

 side of the question and accounts for the physiological fact that 

 presidents, preachers, and other notable men are bound to pro- 

 duce some very ordinary people, all of which helps us to realize 



