82 NATURAL INHERITANCE. [CHAP. vi. 



collected from time to time and put into bags that I 

 had sent, lettered from K to Q, the same letters having 

 been stuck at the ends of the beds. When the crop was 

 coming to an end, the whole remaining produce of each 

 bed, including the foliage, was torn up, tied together, 

 labelled, and sent to me. Many friends and acquaint- 

 ances had each undertaken the planting and culture of 

 a complete set, so that I had simultaneous experiments 

 going on in various parts of the United Kingdom from 

 Nairn in the North to Cornwall in the South. Two 

 proved failures, but the final result was that I obtained 

 the more or less complete produce of seven sets ; that is 

 to say, the produce of 7x7x10, or of 490 carefully 

 weighed parent seeds. Some additional account of the 

 results is given in Appendix C. 



It would be wholly out of place to enter here into 

 further details of the experiments, or to narrate the 

 numerous little difficulties and imperfections I had to 

 contend with, and how I balanced doubtful cases ; how 

 I divided returns into groups to see if they confirmed 

 one another, or how I conducted any other well-known 

 statistical operation. Suffice it to say that I took im- 

 mense pains, which, if I had understood the general 

 conditions of the problem as clearly as I do now, I 

 should not perhaps have cared to bestow. The results 

 were most satisfactory. They gave me two data, which 

 were all that I wanted in order to understand in its 

 simplest approximate form, the way in which one 

 generation of a people is descended from a previous one ; 

 and thus I got at the heart of the problem at once. 



