variability fails to work out, and is in any case unnecessary, at another point he falls into the opposite mistake of making no attempt to discriminate when discrimination is of the first importance. As we have already incidentally seen, it seems to him to be of no importance whether the variational tendency is tested by variations having an organic congenital base, or by variations which may be merely due to environmental influences during life.[1] To him they are all alike i variations, 'and the most important are those that can most conveniently be caught in the mathematical net. Indeed he goes further than this. He actually discriminates against the more organic and fundamental kinds of variation. It seems to him 'erroneous' to take into account congenital abnormalities of any kind when we wish to test the relative variability of the sexes. In determining the variational tendencies of the sexes we must leave out of account the majority of variations!
The ground on which Professor Pearson rejects abnormalities is that they are 'pathological,' and that it is conceivable that pathological variation might be greater and normal variation less in the same sex.[2] He believes that in regarding the 'normal' and the 'abnormal' as two altogether different and possibly opposed groups of phenomena he is warranted by 'current medical science.'
This is very far indeed from being the case. It is quite true that in ordinary clinical work the physician does make such a distinction; it is practically convenient. But it is not science, and if the physician is a genuine pathologist he admits that it is not. This is so well recognized that I had thought it sufficient to quote the remark of the greatest of pathologists, Virchow, to the effect that every deviation from the parental type has its foundation in a pathological accident—a statement which Professor Pearson, on the strength of what is really a verbal quibble, contemptuously puts aside as 'meaningless.' We ought not to say the 'parental type,' he tells us, we ought to say 'a type lying between the parental type and the race type'; let us say it—and the statement remains substantially the same, so far as the question before us is concerned.[3]
- ↑ It is scarcely necessary to remark that the two groups cannot be absolutely separated.
- ↑ This conception, Mr. Pearson remarks, seems never to have occurred to me. In that shape, happily, it has not. But in 'Man and Woman' and elsewhere I have repeatedly called attention to the fact that, as regards various psychic and nervous conditions, while gross variations are more frequent in men, minor variations are more common in women. This seems to cover whatever truth there may be in Mr. Pearson's supposition.
- ↑ Virchow repeatedly emphasized the statement in question and by no means always in the form that offends Professor Pearson. Thus he remarked in 1894, at the annual meeting of the German Anthropological Society, that
