PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 37 
soil well cultivated may give a good harvest. But, having witnessed 
the success of a great natural teacher in helping unpromising peasant 
children to develop their natural powers, he gives us another botanical 
parallel. Assuming that the wild bullace is the origin of domesticated 
plums, he tells us that by cultivation the bullace can no doubt be 
improved so far as to become a better bullace, but by no means can 
the bullace be made to bear plums. All this is sound biology; but 
translating these facts into the human analogy, he declares that the 
work of the successful teacher shows that with man the facts are other- 
wise, and that the average rustic child, whose normal ideal is ‘ bullace- 
hood,’ can become the rare exception, developing to a stage corre- 
sponding with that of the plum. But the naturalist knows exactly 
where the parallel is at fault. For the wheat and the bullace are 
both breeding approximately true, whereas the human crop, like jute 
and various cottons, is in a state of polymorphic mixture. The popula- 
tion of many English villages may be compared with the crop which 
would result from sowing a bushel of kernels gathered mostly from the 
hedges, with an occasional few from an orchard. If anyone asks 
how it happens that there are any plum-kernels in the sample at all, 
he may find the answer perhaps in spontaneous variation, but more 
probably in the appearance of a long-hidden recessive. For the want 
of that genetic variation, consisting probably, as I have argued, in 
loss of inhibiting factors, by which the plum arose from the wild form, 
neither food, nor education, nor hygiene can in any way atone. Many 
wild plants are half-starved through competition, and transferred to 
garden soil they grow much bigger; so good conditions might certainly 
enable the bullace population to develop beyond the stunted physical and 
mental stature they commonly attain, but plums they can never be. 
Modern statesmanship aims rightly at helping those who have got sown 
as wildings to come into their proper class ; but let not anyone suppose 
such a policy democratic in its ultimate effects, for no course of 
action can be more effective in strengthening the upper classes whilst 
weakening the lower. 
In all practical schemes for social reform the congenital diversity, 
the essential polymorphism of all civilised communities must be recog- 
nised as a fundamental fact, and reformers should rather direct their 
efforts to facilitating and rectifying class-distinctions than to any futile 
attempt to abolish them. ‘The teaching of biology is perfectly clear. 
We are what we are by virtue of our differentiation. The value of 
civilisation has in all ages been doubted. Since, however, the first 
variations were not strangled in their birth, we are launched on that 
course of variability of which civilisation is the consequence. We can- 
not go back to homogeneity again, and differentiated we are likely 
to continue. For a period measures designed to create a spurious 
