Variations In Animals And Plants

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. COKKELATED VARIATIONS. The measurement of correlation?Galton's function?Correlation between various organs in man, in local races of the shrimp, and in crabs?Comparison between primitive and civilised races of man? Correlation between morphological characters and the reproductive system?Genetic Selection in man?Especial fertility of type forms in certain plants?Evolution in the Peppered moth?Parallel variation?Importance of mathematical treatment of variation. All parts of an organism arc to a certain extent related to each other, so that when one part varies other parts vary simultaneously in a greater or less degree. That is to say, variations are correlated. The most marked and obvious correlation is that existing between homologous parts. The symmetry of the corresponding or homologous organs on the right and left sides of the body, which is present in most animals, represents a very close degree of correlation. But even in this case the correlation is not constant or complete. Thus the two arms and the two legs of a man resemble each other very closely indeed, but careful measurement shows that the resemblance is not absolute. Again, the arms, as a rule, vary in length more or less in the same proportion as the legs, but personal experience will probably recall instances to the contrary, in which the length of the limbs was quite disproportionate. Between the arms and the legs, therefore, the degree ofcorrelation is obviously less close than between arm and arm, or leg and leg. Still again, personal experience teaches us that there is correlation between even the length of the face and that of the limbs. Tall men as a rule have longer faces than short men; or, a more striking instance, greyhounds have long heads and long legs on the one hand, as compared w...

Excerpt from Variation in Animals and Plants Variation studied from the mathematical standpoint - Variation of birds diagrammatically represented - Distribution of crab measurements - Normal curve of error - Its relation to binomial curve - Variations in animals and plants subject to Law of Frequency of Error - Measurement of variation in terms of Probable Error, Arithmetic Mean Error, and Error, of Mean Square - Examples of asymmetrical series - Representation of these by a generalised mathematical expression. If a number of individuals of any species be compared, it will be found that they all show differences from each other either in size, shape, colour, relation of parts, or other characteristics; in fact, no two of them are exactly alike. Even if offspring be compared with their own parents, similar, though on the whole not such marked, differences will present themselves. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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