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Hereditary Genius
xvii
both in France and Italy. The establishments for pisciculture afford another
field. It would not be worth while to initiate courses of such experiments
unless the crucial value of what they could teach us when completed had
first been fully assented to. To my own mind they would rank as crucial,
experiments so far as they went, and be worth undertaking, but they did not
appear to strike others so strongly in the same light. Of course before any
such experiments were set on foot, they would have to be considered in
detail by many competent minds, and be closely criticised.
Another topic would have been treated at more length if this book were
rewritten—namely, the distinction between variations and sports. It would
even require a remodelling of much of the existing matter. The views I
have been brought to entertain, since it was written, are amplifications of
those which are already put forward in pp. 354-5, but insufficiently pushed
there to their logical conclusion. They are, that the word variation is used
indiscriminately to express two fundamentally distinct conceptions: sports,
and variations properly so called. It has been shown in Natural
Inheritance that the distribution of faculties in a population cannot possibly
remain constant, if, on the average, the children resemble their parents. If
they did so, the giants (in any mental or physical particular) would become
more gigantic, and the dwarfs more dwarfish, in each successive
generation. The counteracting tendency is what I called “regression.” The
filial centre is not the same as the parental centre, but it is nearer to
mediocrity; it regresses towards the racial centre. In other words, the filial
centre (or the fraternal centre, if we change the point of view) is always
nearer, on the average, to the racial centre than the parental centre was.
There
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