118 NATURAL INHERITANCE. [chap 



of female heights to their male equivalents was justified 

 by the fact that when the individual Statures of a group 

 of females are raised in the proportion of 100 to 108, 

 the Scheme drawn from them fairly coincides with that 

 drawn from male Statures. Marriage selection was found 

 to take no sufficient notice of Stature to be worth con- 

 sideration ; neither was the number of children in 

 Fraternities found to be sensibly affected by the 

 Statures of their Parents. Again, it was seen to be 

 of no consequence when dealing statistically with the 

 offspring, whether their Parents were alike in stature or 

 not, the only datum deserving consideration being the 

 Stature of the Mid-Parent, that is to say, the average 

 value of • (1) the Stature of the Father, and of (2) the 

 Transmuted Stature of the Mother. I fully grant that 

 not one of these deductions may be strictly exact, but 

 the error introduced into the conclusions by supposing 

 them to be correct proves not to be worth taking into 

 account in a first approximation. 



Precisely the same may be said of the ulterior steps 

 in this analysis. Every one of them is based on the 

 properties of an ideally perfect curve, but in no case 

 has there been need to make any sensible departure 

 from the observed results, except in assigning a uniform 

 value to Q in the different Co-Fraternities. Strictly 

 speaking, that value was found to slightly rise or fall as 

 the Mid-Stature of the Co-Fraternity rose or fell. This 

 suggested the advisability of treating the whole inquiry 

 on the principle of the Geometric Mean, Appendix G. 

 I tried that principle in what seemed to be the most 



