Page:Mendel's principles of heredity; a defence.pdf/125

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A Defence of Mendel's Principles of Heredity
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to practical naturalists it was evident from the first that there are great groups of facts which could not on any interpretation be brought within the scope of Galton's Law, and that by no emendation could that Law be extended to reach them. The existence of these phenomena pointed to a different physiological conception of heredity. Now it is precisely this conception that Mendel's Law enables us to form. Whether the Mendelian principle can be extended so as to include some apparently Galtonian cases is another question, respecting which we have as yet no facts to guide us, but we have certainly no warrant for declaring such an extension to be impossible.

Whatever answer the future may give to that question, it is clear from this moment that every case which obeys the Mendelian principle is removed finally and irretrievably from the operations of the Law of Ancestral Heredity.

At this juncture Professor Weldon intervenes as a professed exponent of Mendel's work. It is not perhaps to a devoted partisan of the Law of Ancestral Heredity that we should look for the most appreciative exposition of Mendel, but some bare measure of care and accuracy in representation is demanded no less in justice to fine work, than by the gravity of the issue.

Professor Weldon's article appears in the current number of Biometrika, Vol. I. Pt. II. which reached me on Saturday, Feb. 8. The paper opens with what purports to be a restatement of Mendel's experiments and results. In this "restatement" a large part of Mendel's experiments—perhaps the most significant—are not referred to at all. The perfect simplicity and precision of Mendel's own account are destroyed; with the result that the reader of Professor Weldon's paper, unfamiliar with Mendel's own memoir, can scarcely be blamed if he fail to learn the