In Pursuit of the Gene

52 ¨ GALTON’S DISCIPLES
bly is continuous or nearly so.” What he meant to argue was that “in the
case of particular teeth evidence of discontinuous variation has been given.”
The problem has been further compounded, he now realized, by his failure
to give a more precise definition of discontinuity, Bateson feared, so that
“each hostile reader remains free to attribute to it the one particular meaning
which strikes him as especially foolish and that he can most easily show
to be untrue.” 18
Two days later, Weldon hastened to assure Bateson that he had not approached
Bateson’s book with “any unduly hostile spirit,” and yet, he
added, “it does not even yet seem to me that you make a clear case for discontinuity
in any single instance.” Weldon proceeded to eviscerate Bateson’s
argument with elegant prose, much of which he included nearly verbatim
in a Nature review that appeared in May. While acknowledging the vast effort
that Bateson had put into collecting evidence for his book, Weldon argued
that Bateson had failed to make a compelling case for discontinuous
evolution. The concluding paragraph of Weldon’s review, which was a masterpiece
of understatement, cast serious doubts about the significance of
Bateson’s seven-year 19 effort to document the existence of discontinuous
variation:
The only way in which the question can be settled for a given variation
seems to be by taking large numbers of animals, in which the variation is
known to occur, at random, and making a careful examination and record
of each. Mr. Bateson’s chapter on teeth, like all his chapters, is of
great interest, and will doubtless serve to throw important light on many
things. But a careful histological account of 500 dogs would have done
more to show the least possible size of a tooth in dogs than all the information
so painfully collected. And so in many other cases. 20
Weldon’s negative opinion of Bateson’s book was widely shared by the
scientific community, which was still in the thrall of the Darwinian orthodoxy
of evolution by incremental steps. Professors did not recommend the
book to be read by their students, and it was soon remaindered. In the darkness
of the dismal reception, there was one ray of light: Francis Galton
loved the book. “It was,” Galton wrote in the July issue of the widely read