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Principles of Heredity
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ment which brings into a single focus all the complex lines of hereditary influence. If Darwinian evolution be natural selection combined with heredity, then the single statement which embraces the whole field of heredity must prove almost as epoch-making as the law of gravitation to the astronomer[1]."

As I read there comes into my mind that other fine passage where Professor Pearson warns us

"There is an insatiable desire in the human breast to resume in some short formula, some brief statement, the facts of human experience. It leads the savage to 'account' for all natural phenomena by deifying the wind and the stream and the tree. It leads civilized man, on the other hand, to express his emotional experience in works of art, and his physical and mental experience in the formulae or so-called laws of science[2]."

No naturalist who had read Galton's paper and had tried to apply it to the facts he knew could fail to see that here was a definite advance. We could all perceive phenomena that were in accord with it and there was no reasonable doubt that closer study would prove that accord to be close. It was indeed an occasion for enthusiasm, though no one acquainted with the facts of experimental breeding could consider the suggestion of universal application for an instant.

  1. ↑ I have searched Professor Pearson's paper in vain for any considerable reservation regarding or modification of this general statement. Professor Pearson enuntiates the law as "only correct on certain limiting hypotheses," but he declares that of these the most important is the absence of reproductive selection, i.e. the negligible correlation of fertility with the inherited character, and the absence of sexual selection." The case of in-and-in breeding is also reserved.
  2. ↑ K. Pearson, Grammar of Science, 2nd ed. 1900, p. 36.
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