Page:Mendel's principles of heredity; a defence.pdf/132

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A Defence of Mendel's

But two years have gone by, and in 1900 Pearson writes[1] that the values obtained from the Law of Ancestral Heredity

"seem to fit the observed facts fairly well in the case of blended inheritance. In other words we have a certain amount of evidence in favour of the conclusion: That whenever the sexes are equipotent, blend their characters and mate pangamously, all characters will be inherited at the same rate,"

or, again in other words, that the Law of Ancestral Heredity after the glorious launch in 1898 has been home for a complete refit. The top-hamper is cut down and the vessel altogether more manageable; indeed she looks trimmed for most weathers. Each of the qualifications now introduced wards off whole classes of dangers. Later on (pp. 487-8) Pearson recites a further list of cases regarded as exceptional. "All characters will be inherited at the same rate" might indeed almost be taken to cover the results in Mendelian cases, though the mode by which those results are arrived at is of course wholly different.

Clearly we cannot speak of the Law of Gravitation now. Our Tycho Brahe and our Kepler, with the yet more distant Newton, are appropriately named as yet to come[2].

But the truth is that even in 1898 such a comparison was scarcely happy. Not to mention moderns, these high hopes had been finally disposed of by the work of the experimental breeders such as Kölreuter, Knight, Herbert, Gärtner, Wichura, Godron, Naudin, and many more. To have treated as non-existent the work of this group of naturalists, who alone have attempted to solve the problems

  1. ↑ Grammar of Science, 2nd ed. 1900, p. 480.
  2. ↑ Phil. Trans. 1900, vol. 195, A, p. 121.
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