CHAP, xviii A "FAIRY TALE OF SCIENCE"? 239 



tion is not of this generation ; though living in, and 

 by, the living body of the adult of to-day, it owes its 

 origin to other bodies, whose qualities it hopes one 

 day to reproduce when its chance arrives. The owl 

 comes from the egg, but the egg comes only in part 

 from the parent owls. Another distinct part of the 

 living embryonic substance owes its being to older 

 birds. Mr. Francis Galton, great experimentalist and 

 statistician, has arrived at a formula for the higher 

 races. One-fourth he calculates belongs to each 

 parent, one-sixteenth to each grandparent, and the 

 remaining aliquot part of one-fourth, I presume, to 

 remoter generations still. 



It must not be supposed, however, that Galton 

 agrees with Darwin in believing in pangenesis. His 

 position is much more nearly that of Weismann. 

 He can only hold that one-fourth part in each of the 

 offspring is (on the average ?) like in quality to the 

 father or mother, not, as Darwin might do, that 

 the child owes its being and nature in the proportion 

 of one-fourth to the father, and the same to the 

 mother. By a fuller consideration of the problems 

 of atavism, and by a growing hesitation to admit the 

 inheritance of acquired qualities, doctrines of the 

 continuity of the germ plasm have gained in popular- 

 ity and acceptance. There are difficulties about the 

 facts. In certain animals it appears that, at a very 

 early stage in embryonic development, part of the 

 segmented ovum is differentiated for reproductive 

 purposes. Here then the parental germ may be 

 styled continuous with the germs which are prepar- 

 ing in the reproductive tissues of the growing em- 

 bryo. But in most cases it is a long time before we 



