PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 27 
At various times it has been declared that men are born equal, and 
that the inequality is brought abent by unequal opportunities. 
Acquaintance with the pedigrees of disease soon shows the fatuity of 
such fancies. The same conclusion, we may be sure, would result 
from the true representation of the descent of any human faculty. 
Neyer since Galton’s publications can the matter have been in any 
doubt. At the time he began to study family histories even the broad 
significance of heredity was frequently denied, and resemblances to 
parents or ancestors were looked on as interesting curiosities. 
Inveighing against hereditary political institutions, Tom Paine remarks 
that the idea is as absurd as that of an ‘ hereditary wise man,’ or an 
‘ hereditary mathematician,’ and to this day I suppose many people are 
not aware that he is saying anything more than commonly foolish. 
We, on the contrary, would feel it something of a puzzle if two parents, 
both mathematically gifted, had any children not mathematicians. 
Galton first demonstrated the overwhelming importance of these con- 
siderations, and had he not been misled, partly by the theory of 
pangenesis, but more by his mathematical instincts and training, which 
prompted him to apply statistical treatment rather than qualitative 
analysis, he might, not improbably, have discovered the essential facts 
of Mendelism. 
It happens rarely that science has anything to offer to the common 
stock of ideas at once so comprehensive and so simple that the courses 
of our thoughts are changed. Contributions to the material progress 
of mankind are comparatively frequent. They result at once in 
application. ‘Transit is quickened ; communication is made easier; the 
food-supply is increased and population multiplied. By direct applica- 
tion to the breeding of animals and plants such results must even 
flow from Mendel’s work. But I imagine the greatest practical change 
likely to ensue from modern genetic discovery will be a quickening of 
interest in the true nature of man and in the biology of races. I have 
spoken cautiously as to the evidence for the operation of any simple 
Mendelian system in the descent of human faculty; yet the certainty 
that systems which differ from the simpler schemes only in degree of 
complexity are at work in the distribution of characters among the 
human population cannot fail to influence our conceptions of life and 
of ethics, leading perhaps ultimately to modification of social usage. 
That change cannot but be in the main one of simplification. The 
eighteenth century made great pretence of a return to nature, but it 
did not occur to those philosophers first to inquire what nature is; 
and perhaps not even the patristic writings contain fantasies much 
further from physiological truth than those which the rationalists of 
the ‘ Encyclopedia ’ adopted as the basis of their social schemes. For 
men are so far from being born equal or similar that to the naturalist 
