11s NATURAL INHERITANCE. [cxsr
of female heights to their male equivalents was justified by the fact that when the individual Statures of a group of females are raised in the proportion of 100 to 108, the Scheme drawn from them fairly coincides with that drawn from male Statures. Marriage selection was found to take no sufficient notice of Stature to be worth consideration ; neither was the number of children in Fraternities found to be sensibly affected by the Statures of their Parents. Again, it was seen to be of no consequence when dealing statistically with the offspring, whether their Parents were alike in stature or not, the -only datum deserving consideration being the Stature of the Mid-Parent, that is to say, the average value of (1) the Stature of the Father, and of (2) the Transmuted Stature of the Mother. I fully grant that not one of these deductions may be strictly exact, but the error introduced into the conclusions by supposing them to be correct proves not to be worth taking into account in a first approximation.
Precisely the same may be said of the ulterior steps in this analysis. Every one of them is based on the properties of an ideally perfect curve, but in no case has there been need to make any sensible departure from the observed results, except in assigning a uniform value to Q in the different Co-Fraternities. Strictly speaking, that value was found to slightly rise or fall as the Mid-Stature of the Co-Fraternity rose or fell. This suggested the advisability of treating the whole inquiry on the principle of the Geometric Mean, Appendix G. I tried that principle in what seemed to be the most
