SHORTKR articles and discussion 



A NEGLECTED PAPER ON NATURAL SELECTION IN 

 THE ENGLISH SPARROW 



In referring to Professor Rumpus's paper, ''The Elimination 

 of the Unfit as Illustrated by the Introduced Sparrow, Passer 

 domesticus," 1 as neglected, I do not intend to imply that it is 

 unique in this respect. Several other important quantitative 

 studies of natural selection, for instance papers by Weldon, Di 

 Cesnola and Pearson, are in the same class. Indeed, the im- 

 pression gained by reading papers commemorating the birth of 

 Darwin and the publication of the ''Origin of Species by Means 

 of Natural Selection" is that the majority of biologists have 

 little interest in natural selection as a scientific problem. The 

 chief reason for this is probably the great development of exper- 

 imental breeding during the last decad* — a development which 

 is a great source of satisfaction to biologists, but which has tem- 

 porarily brought the study of evolution to a very one-sided 

 stage of development. 



such problems were not in the hands of many biologists. Re- 

 cently in connection with some other work I had occasion to 

 throw Dr. Bumpus's data 2 into statistical constants. These are 

 published in the hope that they may suggest to some unoccupied 

 biologist the collection of further quantitative data on the sev- 

 eral problems presented by the introduced sparrow. 



The characters dealt with are the following: (1) Total length 

 in millimeters from tip of beak to tip of tail ; (2) alar extent, the 

 distance in millimeters from tip to tip of extended wings; (3) 

 weight in grams; (4) length of head in millimeters from tip of 

 beak to the occiput; (5) length of humerus in fractions of an 

 inch; (6) length of femur in fractions of an inch; (7) length of 

 tibio-tarsus in fractions of an inch; (8) width of skull in frac- 

 tions of an inch; (!h length of sternum in fractions of an inch. 



