[55] I have searched Professor Pearson’s paper in vain for any considerable reservation regarding or modification of this general statement. Professor Pearson enuntiates the law as “only correct on certain limiting hypotheses,” but he declares that of these the most important is “the absence of reproductive selection, i.e. the negligible correlation of fertility with the inherited character, and the absence of sexual selection.” The case of in-and-in breeding is also reserved. As I read there comes into my mind that other fine passage where Professor Pearson warns us “There is an insatiable desire in the human breast to resume in some short formula, some brief statement, the facts of human experience. It leads the savage to ‘account’ for all natural phenomena by deifying the wind and the stream and the tree. It leads civilized man, on the other hand, to express his emotional experience in works of art, and his physical and mental experience in the formulae or so-called laws of science[56].” [56] K. Pearson, _Grammar of Science_, 2nd ed. 1900, p. 36. No naturalist who had read Galton’s paper and had tried to apply it to the facts he knew could fail to see that here was a definite advance. We could all perceive phenomena that were in accord with it and there was no reasonable doubt that closer study would prove that accord to be close. It was indeed an occasion for enthusiasm, though no one acquainted with the facts of experimental breeding could consider the suggestion of universal application for an instant. But two years have gone by, and in 1900 Pearson writes[57] that the values obtained from the Law of Ancestral Heredity [57] _Grammar of Science_, 2nd ed. 1900, p. 480. “seem to fit the observed facts fairly well in the case of _blended_ inheritance. In other words we have a certain amount of evidence in favour of the conclusion: _That whenever the sexes are equipotent, blend their characters and mate pangamously, all characters will be inherited at the same rate_,” or, again in other words, that the Law of Ancestral Heredity after the glorious launch in 1898 has been home for a complete refit. The top-hamper is cut down and the vessel altogether more manageable; indeed she looks trimmed for most weathers. Each of the qualifications now introduced wards off whole classes of dangers. Later on (pp. 487–8) Pearson recites a further list of cases regarded as exceptional. “All characters will be inherited at the same rate” might indeed almost be taken to cover the results in Mendelian cases, though the mode by which those results are arrived at is of course wholly different. Clearly we cannot speak of the Law of Gravitation now. Our Tycho Brahe and our Kepler, with the yet more distant Newton, are appropriately named as yet to come[58]. [58] _Phil. Trans._ 1900, vol. 195, A, p. 121.