Walter Frank BapJiael Weldon. 1860—1906. 
43 
feet, and were often met en route by the residents in the uplands, the numbers 
being swelled by the addition of biometricians from the London or Oxford schools. 
Hence arose a series of Friday " biometric teas," for the discussion of the week's 
work and plans for the next two days. Saturday and Sunday morning were given 
to steady calculating and reducing work, and much was got through. The data on 
assortative mating in man collected in the previous year were reduced and a joint 
paper sent to press ; the immense amount of calculation and reduction involved in 
the mouse-paper was got through; a joint criticism of Johannsen's Ueher Erhlichheit 
in Populationen und in reinen Linien was written by the co-editors under the title 
" Inheritance in Phaseolus vulgaris " (36) ; the Huxley Lecture was written with 
yeoman help from the Oxford contingent, and lastly, a joint study was made, 
at Weldon's suggestion, of the relationship between Mendelian formulae and the 
theory of ancestral heredity. It was shown that there was no essential antagonism 
between the two methods of approaching the subject, and the results were 
published ultimately as Part xil of the Mathematical Contributions to the Theory of 
Evolution, Weldon persistently declining to allow it to appear as a joint memoir, 
because he had taken no part in certain portions of the more complicated algebraic 
analysis. Christmas found two-thirds of the party i-eunited in Palermo, and Weldon 
on the snail quest. His letters thence to his co-editor teem with the freshness of 
the sky and the joy of open-air work : 
"Out between five and six, in the dark, withovit any breakfast, sunrise up in the hills, a day's 
tramp on a piece of bread and a handful of olives, and home at seven, laden with snails. Then 
after dinner to clean the beasts. That is not work, and it makes one very fit, but one gets tired 
enough to sleep when the snails are cleaned ! 
The camera works all right, and I think there is a very marked correlation between 
the general character of the limestones and the character of the shells ; but developing in one's 
bedroom does not make for negatives which will " process " ! Also it involves heavy subsidies 
to such chambermaids as do not understand what new form of madness this particular foreigner 
has developed ! 
I have repeated all last year's collections, and have tried hard to get a series of forms, such as 
Kobelt describes, intermediate between the rounded and the flat keeled forms, but I cannot at 
present find these. They ought (according to him) to live in a certain wilderness of beautiful 
mountains twenty miles away. I have several times tramped without any result. I hope to try 
again. I feel sure something worth having will come out of these shells ; they illustrate local 
races and the general jjroblem of what is a species splendidly. But the question of their 
markings comes in also ; and you, or Galton, or someone, will have to make a scale of patterns 
for me, I expect. They will be the most perfectly hopeless things to draw ! 
It is, of course, just conceivable that the intermediate, slightly keeled forms described in 
1879 by Kobelt have been exterminated since his time ? He is very precise in his localities, and 
everywhere except in his transitional region I find exactly what he describes, but in this region I 
find so far only rounded forms. 
The only difiiculties about tramping in this country are the carabinieri. Every high road is 
patrolled by groups of two or three, so that even in a desolate jjlace, so long as you keep to the 
road, you are rarely out of rifle shot ; but these men come and solennily warn you that the 
people round are ruffians, who would cheerfully cut your throat for a soldo ; and if you simply 
grin, they make a great pretence of falling in behind you and guarding you — Now collecting 
snails with an armed guard becomes ridiculous after a time and there is no danger at all ; the 
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