THEORIES AND CONCLUSIONS 
lacking in either of their forebears. Nor 
did the new trees show any similarity in 
growth to the old, a new tree in thirteen 
years having grown six times as large of 
girth and six times as tall as the parents had 
grown in twenty-eight years. 
Here, as in hundreds of cases all through 
his career, the so-called laws have been 
absolutely disproven by the evidence accu- 
mulating in the tests carried on upon so 
colossal a scale. The old laws were announced 
upon much such reasoning as this: Here 
are ten or twenty or even a hundred men; 
a certain number of them will yield to 
temptation of a certain type, a certain other 
per cent will stand fast: seventy-five of 
a hundred children born of vicious parents 
will grow up scoundrels, twenty-five per 
cent saints. The instances, for illustration, 
develop as predicted, but outside the hundred 
examples lie ten million others, influenced, 
as in the case of Mr. Burbank’s plants, by 
a million hereditary tendencies and a million 
events of environment leading to totally 
different ends, setting at naught the inferences 
to be drawn from the hundred. 
343 
