ON THE LAWS OF INHEKITANCE IN MAN. 
II. ON THE INHERITANCE OF THE MENTAL AND MORAL 
CHARACTERS IN MAN, AND ITS COMPARISON WITH THE 
INHERITANCE OF THE PHYSICAL CHARACTERS*. 
By KARL PEARSON, F.R.S. 
(i) Introductory.— The Material and its Collection. 
There are probably few persons who would now deny the immense importance 
of ancestry in the case of any domestic animal. The stud-books, which exist for 
horses, cattle, dogs, cats and even canaries, demonstrate the weight practically 
given to ancestry when the breeding of animals has developed so far that certain 
physical characters possess commercial value. A majority of the community woiild 
probably also admit to-day that the physical characters of man are inherited with 
practically the same intensity as the like characters in cattle and horses. But 
few, however, of the majority who accept this inheritance of physique in man, 
apply the results which flow from such acceptance to their own conduct in life — 
still less do they appreciate the all important bearing of these results upon 
national life and social habits. Nor is the reason for this — or better, one out 
of several reasons for this — hard to find. The majority of mankind are more 
or less conscious that man has not gained his pre-eminence by physique alone. 
They justly attribute much of his dominance in the animal kingdom to those 
mental and moral characters, which have rendered him capable of combining 
with his neighbours to form stable societies with highly differentiated tasks and 
circumscribed duties for their individual members. 
Within such communities we see the moral characters developing apparently 
under family influences ; the mental characters developing not only under home 
training, but under the guidance of private and public teachers, the whole 
contributing to form a complex system of national education. To use technical 
* Being the Fonrth Annual Huxley Lecture before the Anthropological Institute, reprinted with the 
sanction of the Council. 
