II HISTORICAL 13 



Nevertheless one interesting and noteworthy attempt 

 to give greater precision to the term heredity was made 

 about this time. Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, 

 working upon data relating to the breeding of Basset 

 hounds, found that he could express on a definite statistical 

 scheme the proportion in which the different colours ap- 

 peared in successive generations. Every individual was 

 conceived of as possessing a definite heritage which might 

 be expressed as unity. Of this, \ was on the average 

 derived from the two parents {i.e. \ from each parent), 

 \ from the four grandparents, \ from the eight great- 

 grandparents, and so on. The Law of Ancestral Heredity, 

 as it was termed, expresses with fair accuracy some of the 

 statistical phenomena relating to the transmission of char- 

 acters in a mixed population. But the problem of the 

 way in which characters are distributed from gamete to 

 zygote and from zygote to gamete remained as before. 

 Heredity is essentially a physiological problem, and 

 though statistics may be suggestive in the initiation of 

 experiment, it is upon the basis of experimental fact that 

 progress must ultimately rest. For this reason, in spite 

 of its ingenuity and originality, Galton's theory and the 

 subsequent statistical work that has been founded upon 

 it failed to give us any deeper insight into the nature of the 

 hereditary process. 



While Galton was working in England the German zool- 

 ogist August Weismann was elaborating the complicated 



