Natural inheritance / by Francis Galton.

  • Galton, Francis, 1822-1911.
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Natural inheritance / by Francis Galton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    27/282 (page 11)
    II] PROCESSES IN HEREDITY. 13 by what we may see in plots of Avild vegetation, where two varieties of a plant mix freely, and the general aspect of the vegetation becomes a blend of the two, or Avhere individuals of one variety congregate and take exclusive possession of one place, and those of another variety congregate in another. A peculiar interest attaches itself to mutually exclu¬ sive heritages, owing to the aid they must afford to the establishment of incipient races. A solitary peculiarity that blended freely with the characteristics of the parent stock, would disappear in hereditary transmission, as quickly as the white tint imported by a solitary Euro¬ pean would disappear in a black population. If the European mated at all, his spouse must be black, and therefore in the very first generation the offspring would be mulattoes, and half of his whiteness would be lost to them. If these mulattoes did not inter¬ breed, the whiteness would be reduced in the second generation to one quarter ; in a very few more genera¬ tions all recognizable trace of it would have gone. But if the whiteness refused to blend with the black¬ ness, some of the offspring of the white man would be wholly white and the rest wholly black. The same event would occur in the grandchildren, mostly but not exclusively in the children of the white offspring, and so on in subsequent generations. Therefore, unless the white stock became wholly extinct, some undiluted specimens of it would make their appear¬ ance during an indefinite time, giving it repeated