OCR Rendition - approximate

82   NATURAL INHERITANCE.   [ cxar. vi.

collected from time to time and put into bags that I had sent, lettered from K to Q, the same letters having been stuck at the ends of the beds. When the crop was coming to an end, the whole remaining produce of each bed, including the foliage, was torn tip, tied together, labelled, and sent to me. Many friends and acquaintances had each undertaken the planting and culture of a complete set, so that I had simultaneous experiments going on in various parts of the United Kingdom from Nairn in the North to -Cornwall in the South. Two proved failures, but the final result was that I obtained the more or less complete produce of seven sets ; that is to say, the produce of 7 x 7 x 10, or of 490 carefully weighed parent seeds. Some additional account of the results is given in Appendix C.

It would be wholly out of place to enter here into further details of the experiments, or to narrate the numerous little difficulties and imperfections I had to contend with, and how I balanced doubtful cases ; how I divided returns into groups to see if they confirmed one another, or how I conducted any other well-known statistical operation. Suffice it to say that I took immense pains, which, if I had understood the general conditions of the problem as clearly as I do now, I should not perhaps have cared to bestow. The results were most satisfactory. They gave me two data, which were all that I wanted in order to understand in its simplest approximate form, the way in which one generation of a people is descended from a previous one ; and thus I got at the heart of the problem at once.