world and find that in nine cases out of ten you had simply produced
mediocre offspring or offspring below mediocrity. Out of the remaining
tenth a great majority would be beautiful simply by "taking after" one
or other parent, simply through the predominance, the _prepotency,_
of one parent over the other, a thing that might have happened equally
well if the other parent was plain. The first sort of beauty (in my
three formulae) wedding the third sort of beauty, might simply result
in a rather ugly excess of F, and again the first sort might result
from a combination of

a, b, c, d, e, _F_, etc.,
and
_A_, b, c, d, e, f, etc.,

neither of which arrangements, very conceivably, may be beautiful at
all when it is taken alone. In this respect, at any rate, personal
value and reproductive value may be two entirely different things.

Now what the elements of personal aspect really are, what these
elements a, b, c, d, e, f, etc., may be, we do not know with any sort
of exactness. Possibly height, weight, presence of dark pigment in the
hair, whiteness of skin, presence of hair upon the body, are simple
elements in inheritance that will follow Galton's arithmetical
treatment of heredity with some exactness. But we are not even sure of
that. The height of one particular person may be due to an exceptional
length of leg and neck, of another to an abnormal length of the
vertebral bodies of the backbone; the former may have a rather less
than ordinary backbone, the latter a stunted type of limb, and an
intermarriage may just as conceivably (so far as our present knowledge
goes) give the backbone of the first and the legs of the second as it