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 "laws" have been shown not 

 to apply, save in rare instances, by the evidence 

 accumulating 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 he 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. 



