638 



THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. XL V 



Third. Insinuations concernitu: dialectics may perhaps justify 

 a digression concerning data. During the past five or six years 

 some 100,000 countings, weighings, measurements, etc., bearing 

 directly on the problem of pure lines in garden beans — the 

 species on which -lohannsen based his studies — have accumulated 

 in my notes. These data have taught me how idle it is to discuss 

 the pure line problem without the most refined himnetric analysis 

 of large masses of data. Such analysis necessarily proceeds with 

 disheartening slowness. But I have been able to see no advan- 

 tage in dragging this material through a long series of prelimi- 

 nary papers necessarily based upon uncompleted work. When 

 the data are all in, and arranged in an orderly manner they will 

 be honestly set forth as "an accumulation of plain, unadorned 

 facts, available to any one's inspection." 



J. Arthur Harris. 



Cold Spring Harbor, 

 September 15, 1911. 

 actually or tacitly— and quite unfairly— I drew in question the accuracy 



justification for it. Both will be quite wrong. In five different places I 



emphatically stated that our differences— which as yet I see no reason to 

 cancel out— are merely those of interpretation. What I actually said was, 

 "The work of Pearl and Surface with poultry and maize seems to me to 



