PALM AND SOLE STUDIES. 245 



Here there is brought forcibly before the reader the question of 

 unilateral inheritance, i. e., whether a character possessed upon 

 the right side only in the parent may cross over in the offspring, 

 and appear on the left side, or whether each side inherits inde- 

 pendently. The mother C has a loop upon the right foot, and a 

 divergence only upon the left, and the same condition obtains 

 in her son L. In the daughter J, however, these conditions are 

 reversed, and the right loop in both father and mother fail to 

 govern the right heel of J. The loop which / possesses upon her 

 left foot may have been inherited from the father, as he has a 

 loop on each foot, but does the loop upon her mother's right foot 

 have any influence? Facts thus far, in all the families studied, 

 tend to show that inheritance does not cross from one side to the 

 other, but we are yet a long way from stating this definitely, or 

 even as a plausible hypothesis. The two definite points that 

 appear as the result of this investigation are (i) that the calcar 

 loop is heritable, and (2) that its presence upon the right foot of both 

 parents does not compel its appearance upon the same foot of the 

 offspring. 



VII. BIBLIOGRAPHY OF FRICTION-SKIN CONFIGURATION. 

 This list is intended to be complete on the subject of the fric- 

 tion-skin configuration of the palms and soles. On the apical 

 patterns it makes no attempt to be exhaustive, as the subject is 

 now in the hands of the police department of all civilized coun- 

 tries, and has been largely exploited for practical purposes of 



* 



personal identification, developing a large mass of literature 

 hardly morphological in the technical sense. 



There is also little or nothing upon the structure of the skin as 

 such, on its development or histology, or on the innervation, 

 which has been especially a subject of investigation by psychol- 

 ogists. 



At the end there is appended a list of the published investiga- 

 tions of Newman and Patterson on the subject of polyembryony 

 in the armadillo, extensively referred to in Section IV. of the 

 present paper. This subject, as it relates to scute and band 

 anomalies of the carapace, and their inheritance by twins and 

 other duplicate individuals, is of special interest here. 



