DESCENT WITH MODIFICATION 159 
as regression or the pull of the ancestry. The reason of it is 
that some of these short parents are children of tall people, and 
in these cases the height is helped out by the stature of the 
grandparent. Also, some of the extremely tall parents were 
themselves children of short grandparents, all of which lessens 
greatly their powers of transmitting as much stature as they 
themselves possess. 
Some offspring better and some worse than their parents. 
A careful study of this table shows that whatever the parent, 
whether mediocre, inferior, or exceptional, the offspring will 
take the form of a distribution extending both ways from a 
mean or mode, said mean or mode being not far from that of 
the parent. If the parent is above the average of the race, the 
majority of the offspring will be below the parent ; if, however, 
the parent is below the average, then the majority of the off- 
spring will be better than their parents. 
The exceptional parent and his offspring. There is a foolish 
notion that preachers’ sons are especially likely to go wild. Let 
us analyze this problem in the light of this table. In the first 
place, admitting the parent to be exceptional, what are the 
chances of the offspring being also exceptional? This is an 
important question, — indeed, one of the most important in 
all studies in heredity. 
Substituting general excellence in place of stature for the 
moment, let us refer to the table. We see at once that an excep- 
tional parent, or even an exceptional midparent, which means 
two exceptional parents, is by no means certain of exceptional 
offspring, unless, indeed, the exceptional quality is of many 
generations standing. Take the case of the 70.5-inch parents, 
— two inches above the average. Of their entire offspring (68), 
1 was almost a dwarf, 51 were shorter than their parents, and 
7 were distinctly below the average of the race. This is one 
side of the question and accounts for the physiological fact that 
presidents, preachers, and other notable men are bound to pro- 
duce some very ordinary people, all of which helps us to realize 
