If heredity be dominant in the garden, it does not follow that it is dominant even in the menagerie, let alone in the street. Conclusions arrived at in the study of insects are not necessarily true of Indians. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that man, because of his long period of infancy, is much less determined by heredity than is any other form of life. This in itself knocks the foundation from under nine tenths of the arguments we hear upon the subject. Even profound changes in the body may be produced by (or with the aid of) environment. The third generation of immigrants to America are said to have higher cheek-bones--that is, to be more like redmen--than the immigrants themselves. The discovery of the functions of the ductless glands shows how food, or the manner of life, may be at work in cases where germ-plasm used to get all the credit. The notion that heredity is destiny has altogether broken down. [Illustration: ALBERT EDWARD WIGGAM The Devil take the hindmost!] Says Professor Herbert S. Jennings, of Johns Hopkins, in an article entitled “Heredity and Environment” in the _Scientific Monthly_ for September, 1924: “Clearly it is not necessary to have a characteristic merely because one inherits it. Or more properly, characteristics are not inherited at all; what one inherits is certain material that under certain conditions will produce a particular characteristic; if those conditions are not supplied, some other characteristic is produced.” Thus heredity becomes a mere capacity--and that we do inherit certain capacities need not be denied. The fundamental laws of heredity were first made known in 1866, when Gregor Mendel, a monk of the Augustinian order, read his now world-famous paper upon heredity in plants before the Naturalists’ Society of the little town of Brünn, in Moravia. He had made more than 10,000 observations upon the peas growing in the garden of his monastery--wonderful observations. Their results, too complicated to be fully described here, may be sufficiently summarized in a few words--and in order that there may be no mistake, I shall take the words from Mr. Wiggam himself,[115] omitting only his running comment: “If you cross tall peas with dwarf peas the offspring will be as tall as the parents. The dwarfness has completely vanished. If you cross these tall offspring back with a dwarf, one-half of the offspring of this cross will be dwarfs and one-half will be talls. However, instead of crossing the talls back with dwarfs, if you place capsules over their blossoms so they will not get crossed, and then sow their seeds, one-fourth--not one-half--of their seeds will come up dwarf and three-fourths will come up tall.”