SCIENCE AND LIFE.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1031, 21 January 1911, Page 6

SCIENCE AND LIFE.

By the death' of Sir Francis Galton, recorded in yesterday's issue of' The Dominion, the world of modern scienco has lost one of its most famous leaders. So was not content to let his - fame rest on the mere fact that lie was the cousin of Charles Darwin, but by years. of careful study and research ho succeeded iri opening, up what is practically a heW branch of scientific investigation —tho statistical study of inheritance. By tho . collection and classification of statistics as to resemblances and differences in successive generations as regards stature, colour of eyes, temper, artistic faculty, and some forms of disease, ho arrived at, as Professor J. A. Thomson tells us, "several general inductions which express the inherent orderliness obtaining oven in a domain where occurrences seem as capricious as those of weather." Galton's data consisted mainly of family records and ' measurements made at his anthropometric laboratory, and by observations on sweet peas, and moths. , The bearing of these investigations era ' our knowledge of inheritance is lucidly stated by Professor Thomson in the following passage in his book on "Darwinism and Human Life" It lias often been remarked that tho children of extraordinarily gifted parents are sometimes very ordinary individuals, and that' the childron of under-average parents somotimes turn out surprisingly well, both physically and mentally. Everyone who has looked into the facts of inheritance in greater detail, and lias compared the nverago of qualities in successive generations, has noticed, in a general way, that there is a tendency to sustain tho samo average level from generation to generation. Even the older inquirers, like Lucas, called attention to the fact that extraordinary qualities in families tend to wane away, as if thero vero some mysterious succession tax, levied on deviations fiom' the average, whether in the way of exceiionco or defect. But we owe to Galton's careful statistical work tho generalicatioii blown as . the Law. of Filial Rcgres.

sion, which lias replaced a vague impression by a definite formula, lie has defined and measured the tendency towards the tendency to approximate to the mean, or average, of the stock. This filial Regression has nothing to do with reversion or with degeneration; it works upwards as well as downwards, forwards as well as backwards. If it discourages the extravagant hopes of a gifted parent (hat his children will inherit all his powers, it 110 less discountenances extravagant fears that they will inherit all his weakness and disease. According to the law of ancestral inheritance the two parents between thein contribute, on an average, onehalf of each inherited faculty, eaclv of them contributing one-quarter of it. The four grand-parents between them contribute one-quarter, or each of them one-sixteenth, and so on in an infinite series. These: facts contribute an clement of hops to the difficult problems of'heredity. Each person is the product of two lines of descent, one through his father and the other through his mother, going back to the beginning of the race; or, as the Rev. P. N. Wag.gett puts it in a very able paper on "Science and Conduct)" "the individual life is the product of two infinities of. inherited qualities coming from every, quarter, in most cases, of a largo pc/rtion of thehuman race." There is a tendency to overlook these important facts in much of the talk we so frequently hear about people _ being the victims of heredity. It is, of course, quite true that there is some necessary result of heredity in each of us, but what that result is in any particular case no one knows, and certainly no one can say that it is bad. "No one knows,", .says Mr. Waggeit, "if there bo an irresistible moral tendency, what that tendency is, and therefore a man cannot tell until he .tries that he has not the constitution required for a good life." In view of the enormous diversity of hereditary stocks and thS resulting series of predispositions, it is not possible for any person to express them all in his life, history. There will always be a surplus—numerical and qualitative. There is thus in the narrow avenue of our life a "block" of capacities.. Choice of some sort, therefore, becomes possible, if not inevitable, and this opens the door to moral effort. This: line of .thought may claim support of that new and brilliant school of philosophy which insists upon the reality of free will, and tells us that nature and life cannot be contained in the concepts and methods of mathematics.. The intellect cannot comprehend life in its fulness. Taking all things into consideration, we seem to be justified in the conclusion that the contributions of Sir Francis Galton- and other like minds to our knowledge of human life allows us still-to" regard ourselves as responsible beings, with the capacity, to-a large extent, of working out'our own salvation; and that moral'effort is, on the whole; encouraged by the'latest theories ,of inheritance.