352 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



significance of heredity was frequently denied, and resemblances to 

 parents or ancestors were looked on as interesting curiosities. 

 Inveighing against hereditary political institutions, Tom Paine remarks 

 that the idea is as absurd as that of an "hereditary wise man," or an 

 " hereditary mathematician," and to this day I suppose many people 

 are not aware that he is saying anything more than commonly foolish. 

 We, on the contrary, would feel it something of a puzzle if two 

 parents, both mathematically gifted, had any children not mathe- 

 maticians. Galton first demonstrated the overwhelming importance 

 of these considerations, and had he not been misled, partly by the 

 theory of pangenesis, but more by his mathematical instincts and 

 training, which prompted him to apply statistical treatment rather 

 than qualitative analysis, he might, not improbably, have discovered 

 the essential facts of Mendelism. 



It happens rarely that science has anything to offer to the 

 common stock of ideas at once so comprehensive and so simple that 

 the courses of our thoughts are changed. Contributions to the 

 material progress of mankind are comparatively frequent. They 

 result at once in application. Transit is quickened ; communication 

 is made easier ; the food-supply is increased and population multi- 

 plied. By direct application to the breeding of animals and plants 

 such results must even flow from Mendel's work. But I imagine the 

 greatest practical change likely to ensue from modern genetic discovery 

 will be a quickening of interest in the true nature of man and in the 

 biology of races. I have spoken cautiously as to the evidence for the 

 operation of any simple Mendelian system in the descent of human 

 faculty ; yet the certainty that systems which differ from the simpler 

 schemes only in degree of complexity are at work in the distribution 

 of characters among the human population cannot fail to influence 

 our conceptions of life and of ethics, leading perhaps ultimately to 

 modification of social usage. That change cannot but be in the 

 main one of simplification. The eighteenth century made great 

 pretence of a return to nature, but it did not occur to those philo- 

 sophers first to enquire what nature is ; and perhaps not even the 

 patristic writings contain fantasies much further from physiological 

 truth than those which the rationalists of the ' Encyclopaedia ' adopted 

 as the basis of their social schemes. For men are so far from being 

 born equal or similar that to the naturalist they stand as the very 

 type of a polymorphic species. Even most of our local 'races 

 consist of many distinct strains and individual types. From the 

 population of any ordinary English town as many distinct human 

 breeds could in a few generations be isolated as there are now breeds 

 of dogs, and indeed such a population in its present state is much 

 what the dogs of Europe would be in ten years' time but for the 

 interference of the fanciers. Even as at present constituted, owing 

 to the isolating effects of instinct, fashion, occupation, and social 

 class, many incipient strains already exist. 



In one respect civilized man differs from all other species of 

 animal or plant in that, having prodigious and ever-increasing power 

 over nature, he invokes these powers for the preservation and main- 



