VII. DISCUSSION OF THE DATA OF STATURE. 105
parents, partly from his ancestry. In every population that intermarries freely, when the genealogy of any man is traced far backwards, his ancestry will be found to consist of such varied elements that they are indistinguishable from a sample taken at haphazard from the general Population. The Mid-Stature M of the remote ancestry of such a man will become identical with P ; in other words, it will be mediocre. To put the same conclusion into another form, the most probable value of the Deviation from P, of his Mid-Ancestors in any remote generation, is zero.
For the moment let us confine our attention to some one generation in the remote ancestry on the one hand, and to the Mid-Parent on the other, and ignore all other generations. The combination of the zero Deviation of the one with the observed Deviation of the other is' the combination of nothing with something. Its effect resembles that of pouring a measure of water into a vessel of wine. The wine is diluted to a constant fraction of its alcoholic strength, whatever that strength may have been.
Similarly with regard to every other generation. The Mid-Deviation in any near generation of the ancestors will have a value intermediate between that of the zero Deviation of the remote ancestry, and of the observed Deviation of the Mid-Parent. Its combination with the Mid-Parental Deviation will be as if a mixture of wine and water in some definite proportion, and not pure water, had been poured into the wine. The process throughout is one of proportionate dilutions, and the
