Prometheus, or, biology and the advancement of man / by H.S. Jennings.

  • Herbert Spencer Jennings
Date:
[1925]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Prometheus, or, biology and the advancement of man / by H.S. Jennings. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    36/112 (page 32)
    PROMETHEUS recognition of limitations is as valuable as other sorts of knowledge ; realiza¬ tion of what we cannot do is as necessary for correct guidance as realization of what we can do. Every pair of human parents contains thousands of pairs of the packets of chemicals on which development depends. From these a set is drawn almost at random (subject to the condition that one packet is taken from each pair possessed by each parent) ; this constitutes the heritage of the child. Any pair of parents may thus produce, not merely thousands, but millions, of different combinations, each yielding a child of different characteristics. There is no way of controlling the combinations that shall enter into a child of given parents ; there is no prospect that there ever will be. It is, therefore, impossible to [34]