396 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



because he is an enthusiastic believer in the efficacy of nurture as 

 opposed to nature, and also because he illustrates his views by 

 frequent appeals to biological analogies which help us to a common 

 ground. Wheat badly cultivated will give a bad yield, though, as 

 Mr. Holmes truly says, wheat of the same strain in similar soil well 

 cultivated may give a good harvest. But, having witnessed the 

 success of a great natural teacher in helping unpromising peasant 

 children to develop their natural powers, he gives us another 

 botanical parallel. Assuming that the wild bullace is the origin of 

 domesticated plums, he tells us that by cultivation the bullace can 

 no doubt be improved so far as to become a better bullace, but by no 

 means can the bullace be made to bear plums. All this is sound 

 biology; but translating these facts into the human analogy, he 

 declares that the work of the successful teacher shows that with man 

 the facts are otherwise, and that the average rustic child, whose 

 normal ideal is " bullace-hood," can become the rare exception, 

 developing to a stage corresponding with that of the plum. But 

 the naturalist knows exactly where the parallel is at fault. For the 

 wheat and the bullace are both breeding approximately true, whereas 

 the human crop, like jute and various cottons, is in a state of poly- 

 morphic mixture. The population of many English villages may be 

 compared with the crop which would result from sowing a bushel of 

 kernels gathered mostly from the hedges, with an occasional few 

 from an orchard. If anyone asks how it happens that there are any 

 plum-kernels in the sample at all, he may find the answ T er perhaps 

 in spontaneous variation, but more probably in the appearance of a 

 long-hidden recessive. For the want of that genetic variation, con- 

 sisting probably, as I have argued, in loss of inhibiting factors, by 

 which the plum arose from the wild form, neither food, nor educa- 

 tion, nor hygiene can in any way atone. Many wild plants are half- 

 starved through competition, and transferred to garden soil they 

 grow much bigger ; so good conditions might certainly enable the 

 bullace population to develop beyond the stunted physical and mental 

 stature they commonly attain, but plums they can never be. Modern 

 -manship aims rightly at helping those who have got sown as 

 wildings to come into their proper class; but let not anyone suppose 

 such a policy democratic in its ultimate effects, for no course of 

 action can be more effective in strengthening the upper classes whilst 

 weakening the lower. 



In all practical schemes for social reform the congenital diversity, 

 the essential polymorphism of all civilised communities must be 

 recognised as a fundamental fact, and reformers should rather direct 

 their efforts to facilitating and rectifying class-distinctions than to 

 any futile attempt to abolish them. The teaching of biology is per- 

 fectly clear. We are what we are by virtue of our differentiation. 

 The value of civilization has in all ages been doubted. Since, how- 

 ever, the first variations were not strangled in their birth, we are 

 launched on that course of variability of which civilization is the 

 consequence. We cannot go back to homogeneity again, and differ- 

 entiated we are likely to continue. For a period measures designed 





