Genetics and Eugenics, a Text-Book for Students of Biology and a Reference Book (Classic Reprint)

This book is an attempt to present, in a form as simple and readily intelligible as possible, the subject of heredity, as related to man and his ereatwes, the domestic animals and cultivated plants. To write such a book has been with the author a long cherished ambition, but one which, as the years went by, seemed less and less likely of realization, as knowledge of the subject increased and took on more and more complicated forms. Each year, however, he has been forced by his responsibilities as a teacher, to make, for students having only an elementary knowledge of biology, an analysis and summary of our knowledge of this subject to date. The longer he has continued to do this, the more fully he has realized that a subject in a state of healthy growth can never assume a final and finished form. He makes no apology, therefore, for presenting the subject with very unevenly and incompletely developed ports. Such, it must be confessed, is the present state of our knowledge. It would be a great service to the student to show him where in his subject positive knowledge stops and speculation, the useful servant but dangerous master in science, begins. This task, where possible, has been attempted in this book. But such attempts can of necessity succeed only partially and for the time being, for it often happens that the speculation of today becomes the verified theory of tomorrow. For having guessed right and proved the correctness of their guesses, we honor in this field the names of Lamarck, Darwin, Weismann, and Mendel. Others still living have made contributions of scarcely less importance but to name them would be invidious.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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