ACQUIRED CHARACTERS 177 



elements in the gray hybrids have been unaffected 

 by the gray color of the hair of the animal that car- 

 ries them. 



JNIan}^ similar tyjjes of inheritance in man tell 

 the same story. A blue-eved man marries a brown- 

 eyed woman, and if she has come from a race pure 

 for brown eyes, all the children will have brown 

 eyes. If an individual of this parentage marries an- 

 other with a similar parentage their children will be 

 brown-eyed and blue-eyed as three to one. Still an- 

 other case may seem more impressive since the char- 

 acter involved is one that dominates the normal and 

 may appear therefore as something more positive 

 in its nature. There is a tyj^e of malformed hand in 

 which the middle segment of each finger is missing. 

 If a short-fingered man marries a normal handed 

 woman half of the children will have short-fingered 

 hands and half of them will be normal. The expla- 

 nation here is the same as before. The man was a 

 hybrid (his father had short fingers and his mother 

 was normal) , hence he produces two kinds of repro- 

 ductive cells. When he marries a woman w^hose re- 

 productive cells are normal, two kinds of offspring 

 are expected and two kinds are found. It may be 

 added that the normal children show no trace what- 

 soever of the influence of the hand of their short- 

 fingered father and never transmit this deformity 

 to their descendants — the separation of the elements 

 in the dominant parent has been clean. 



