no Heredity and Environment 



Let us recall an instance already given : man has been 

 able by careful selection to produce on the one hand 

 the racehorse ; on the other, the heavy and powerful 

 draught-horse, such as the well-known " Clydesdale." 

 If the process of selection is not most carefully guarded 

 in either variety, their particular characteristics tend 

 ere long to disappear, and nature brings back the 

 average type. It is also a striking fact, as Dewar and 

 Finn have pointed out, that if you isolate the race- and 

 draught-horses, keeping them entirely apart, you will 

 find that instead of diverging more and more as time 

 goes on, which we would naturally expect, they tend to 

 become more and more like one another. This is not 

 reversion : it is the strong generic influence destroying 

 the mutations and bringing the different varieties back 

 to the average of the genus. That is what heredity 

 means and what heredity can do. 



The same is true of the different classes into which 

 man is artificially divided. Mr. Galton has dealt with 

 this matter in regard to genius. Remarkable sons 

 succeed remarkable parents, he says, and nephews of 

 the first distinguished man display as great, if not 

 greater talents than himself. But of many cases 

 adduced, in none is the inheritance carried beyond the 

 fourth generation, and he also points out that the 

 highest display of genius is found in the first or second 

 generation, after which decadence sets in, or, as we may 

 say, the return to the average, which is what we would 

 expect. 



If that is true of the aristocracy of intellect, it can be 

 proved to be as true of what is known as the " aris- 

 tocracy of birth," implying, as the phrase does, that 

 the " breed " or " blood " can only be continued by 

 the heredity of the upper classes, who claim to be the 

 ruling classes, and until recently asserted their belief 

 in the possession of a special legislative instinct which 



