EUGENICS AND EDUCATION 133 



qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally" still holds 

 good. 



Galton devotes his attention to the importance of births, he opines: "that 

 a man's natural abilities are derived by inheritance." Thus for the innate 

 characteristics, inheritance is of great importance. As a result of his sta- 

 tistical and experimental investigations in heredity and also as a result of 

 deduction, Galton forms the ancestral law of inheritance. This implies 

 regression, thus children on an average deviate less from the average of the 

 population than their parents. The law of ancestral inheritance offers the 

 possibility of selection. 



Galton investigated as has been said heredity statistically and the results 

 were important. He has come to the opinion that there are natural abilities 

 by heredity, that gifted parents have more chance of having gifted children 

 than non-gifted parents. 



This result is of great significance for the problem of education: people, 

 therefore, are not born alike. It takes us back to the curve of Quetelet and 

 its significance. 



Every period bears its mental stamp. Philosophy also expresses its time 

 in thoughts. Nobody goes beyond his time. But the onesidedness of a 

 time is also its strength. The power of the physical science period of the 

 end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries is the 

 induction, the analysis, the critical sense, the experiment. 



To the great representatives of this period belongs Mendel, the discoverer 

 of the rules of crossing, who goes beyond his time in his ingeniousness. 



Mendel's investigations went considerably further than those of Galton. 

 His crossing experiment laid the basis for the experimental heredity doctrine : 

 Mendelism. 



For our subject we have to speak about a second keen investigator, 

 Johannsen. 



The application of statistics to scientific problems, as we have seen, had 

 great attraction for such men as Quetelet and Galton. 



Johannsen followed the natural scientific method, which is that of in- 

 duction and analysis and contributed in an important degree to the knowl- 

 edge of the significance of the curve of Quetelet and determined the develop- 

 ment of the doctrine of heredity. Johannsen works on the cultivation 

 method of De Vilmorin and Nillson, just as Hugo de Vries did. 



Mendel, with the aid of crossing experiments, investigated how the charac- 

 teristics then express themselves. He found the rules of dominance in the 

 first bastard generation and of splitting (segregation) in the second. The 



