206 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 



known, occurs also very frequently, though in a less degree, 

 in human families. Every one of my readers doubtless 

 knows some members of a family who, in this or that pecu- 

 liarity, much more resemble the grandfather or grandmother 

 than the father or mother. Sometimes it lies in bodily 

 peculiarities, for example, features of face, colour of hair, 

 size of body — sometimes in mental qualities, for example, 

 temperament, energy, understanding — which are trans- 

 mitted in this manner. This fact may be observed in 

 domestic animals as well as in the case of man. Among 

 the domestic animals most liable to vary — as the dog, 

 horse, and ox — breeders very frequently find that the pro- 

 duct by breeding resembles the grandparents far more than 

 it does its own parental organism. If we express this 

 general law and the succession of generations by the letters 

 of the alphabet, then A = C = E, whilst B=D=F, and 

 so on. 



This very remarkable fact appears in a more striking 

 way in the lower animals and plants than in the 

 higher, and especially in the well-known phenomenon of 

 alternation of generations (metagenesis). Here we very 

 frequently find — for example, among the Planarian worms, 

 sea-squirts or Tunicates, Zoophytes, and also among ferns 

 and mosses — that the organic individual in the first place 

 produces, by propagation, a form completely difierent 

 from the parental form, and that only the descendants of 

 this generation, again, become like the first. This regular 

 change of generation was discovered by the poet Chamisso, 

 on his voyage round the world in 1819, among the Salpce, 

 cylindrical tunicates, transparent like glass, which float on 

 the surface of the sea. Here the larger generation, the in- 



