xii.] SUMMARY. 197
Finally, considerations were offered to show that latent elements probably follow the same law as personal ones, and that though a child may inherit qualities from any one of his ancestors (in one case from this one, and in another case from another), it does not follow that the store of hidden property so to speak, that exists in any parent, is made up of contributions from all or even very many of his ancestry.
Two other topics may be mentioned. Reason was given in p. 16 why experimenters upon the transmission of Acquired Faculty should not be discouraged on meeting with no affirmative evidence of its existence in the first generation, because it is among the grandchildren rather than among the children that it should be looked for. Again, it is hardly to be expected that an acquired faculty, if transmissible at all, would be transmitted without dilution, It could at the best be no more than a variation liable to Regression, which would probably so much diminish its original amount on passing to the grandchildren as to render it barely recognizable. The difficulty of devising experiments on the transmission of acquired faculties is much increased by these considerations.
The other subject to be alluded to is the fundamental distinction that may exist between two couples whose personal faculties are naturally alike. If one of the couples consist of two gifted members of a poor stock, and the other of two ordinary members of a gifted stock, the difference between
