In Pursuit of the Gene

296 ¨ NOTES TO PAGES 19–28
58. Letter from Darwin to Galton, May 27 [1872], in Pearson, Galton, 2:168.
59. Letter from Galton to Darwin, May 28, 1872, in Pearson, Galton, 2:168–169.
60. Francis Galton, “On Blood-Relationship,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London,
20 (1872): 394.
61. Ibid., 400.
62. August Weismann posited the existence of special inviolable cells containing
the hereditary material in specific nuclear bodies (chromosomes), but he later acknowledged
that Galton’s theory of heredity was nearly identical to the “main idea
contained in my theory of the continuity of germ-plasm.” Letter from Weismann
to Galton, Feb. 23, 1889, in Pearson, Galton, 3:340n. Weismann had first introduced
the term germ-plasm in his 1883 essay “On Heredity,” which can be found in August
Weismann, Essays upon Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems, 1883, ed. Edward B.
Poulton, Selmar Schonland, and Arthur E. Shipley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889),
104.
63. Letter from Darwin to Galton, Nov. 8, 1872, in Pearson, Galton, 2:175.
2. REVERSION TO THE MEAN
1. Francis Galton, “Hereditary Improvement,” Fraser’s Magazine 13 (1873): 116–130.
2. Ibid., 117.
3. Ibid., 125, 128.
4. Ibid., 123, 128–129.
5. Ibid., 129, 130.
6. Letter from Darwin to Galton, Jan. 4, 1873, in Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters and
Labours of Francis Galton, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914–1930),
2:176.
7. Galton, “Hereditary Improvement,” 119.
8. Letter from Darwin to Galton, Jan. 4., 1873, in Pearson, Galton, 2:176.
9. Alphonse de Candolle, Histoire des sciences et des savants depuis deux siècles (Geneva:
H. Georg, 1873), 181.
10. Ibid., 93–94. Translated in Raymond E. Francher, “Alphonse De Candolle,
Francis Galton, and the Early History of the Nature-Nurture Controversy,” Journal
of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 19 (1983): 345.
11. Candolle, Histoire, data from tables 9 and 10 on pp. 176–177, 181.
12. Ibid., 196–197
13. Ibid., 104–105.