succeeded in discovering clues and laws where others had failed. 
And because of the discovery of these laws and clues, heredity 
is coming to have a new meaning to us. The folly of stratifying so- 
ciety into layers on the basis of ancestry, under the scrutiny of im- 
partial scientific investigation, is becoming more apparent every 
day. We are beginning to realize that ancestral character heritages 
from royalty, or from those who came over in the Mayflower, or 
even from forbears of undoubted talent do not necessarily always 
make for the fit or the best. We are beginning to realize that the 
slums are not necessarily the abode of the unfit. For fit and un- 
fit as society looks at it have more often resulted from the handing 
down of social prestige than from the inheritance of valuable quali- 
ties. Characters, as we are beginning to see, are results of both 
heredity and environment. The fit man of the pioneer knicker- 
bocker days might make a sorry misfit in present New York life. 
And surely a great poet in a society that abhors poetry would be 
anything but a success. The same is true of plants: some var- 
ieties of apples do best in some localities and perhaps become 
only mediocre or even poor varieties in other localities, yet there 
has been no perceptible change in their hereditary make up. It 
is environment that has made the difference. Like, in nature, or 
in man, if we think of the individual as a whole, only rarely pro- 
duces like, for most animals and plants are hybrids. From the 
standpoint of the modern investigations into the genealogy of 
plants and animals, our lives are largely mapped out or predeter- 
mined for us, but our fatalism differs from that of the past in 
that it is based on investigation and not resignation and super- 
stition. Just as some of the tobacco plants when rooted to a 
certain environment, could not avoid being diseased, or in pro- 
ducing diseased as well as normal offspring, so it is with man. 
And so while we are learning how to make two blades of grass 
grow where only one grew before, we are also learning that once 
the variety which does this is produced, it cannot alter itself, pro- 
vided its environment remains the same and no mutation occurs. 
Can the knowledge derived from a study of tobacco plants and 
pea plants be applied to the solving of the problems of heredity 
in animals, particularly man ? The best answer is that they have 
already been making these applications — Davenport, Jordan, God- 
dard and a host of others. But the first clue to the solution of 
these problems, we must remember, came to us from a monk’s 
garden in distant Moravia and from clear sighted studies on the 
comparatively simple garden pea. 
O. E. W. 
