Sent K. Pearson to F. Galton, 6th June 1902.
6 Jun 1902
Description:

‘My dear Francis Galton,

I am afraid you have come back, or will be coming back to find us in the thick of a very unpleasant fight. Weldon’s article on Mendel was a thorough scholarly & scientific account of Mendel’s work and contained in no line of it and personal attack on Bateson. Now Bateson has published two things a Report to the Evolution Committee in which he gives a number of experiments purporting to confirm Mendel – to this there can be no possible objection except that to myself it all seems to cast darkness where we were beginning to see light and he has also published thro’ the Cambridge Press a book on Mendel. This is a most flagrant personal attack on Weldon & indirectly on yourself & myself. Anyone reading this book would believe that we were hopeless idiots & Weldon in addition a first-class knave, who had some private motive in criticising Mendel or whose reputation depended on the destruction of Mendel. Now all this will be very painful to you. I can only suppose that the comparative success of Biometrika is at the bottom of it. It could not be my reply to his Homotypsis[?] criticisim as his book was already in type before my article appeared.

Now if there is anything at all in Mendel, ancestry beyond parents ought not to count, and I propose to work out individual pedigrees in a number of cases for men, horses & dogs. I have already begun with horses & some of them are most suggestive. Thus I take a black colt & find its parents & grandparents all chestnuts or bays, & only when we get to its great grandparents is one of them a famous black horse, Sorcerer. Now I want to do the same thing for your Basset Hounds & for eye-colour in man. Will you lend me your data for both these again? I went through your eye-colours before & found they could not possibly be fitted to Mendel, but I should like to formally put on record cases of individual pedigrees, which show that ancestry beyond parents is significant for man, horse & dog. What may occur for hybrids in inbreeding like that of self-fertilizing plants, I can’t say, I purposely excluded it from my discussion of the ancestral law, because I found I knew nothing of the correlation between pollen & antes in the same plant, which is needful to reach a conclusion.

Please let me know when you are back, and I trust it will be a return in good health.

Yours always sincerely,

Karl Pearson.’