HEREDITY OF PIGMENTATION IN FUNDULUS 
HYBRIDS 
FRANK W. BANCROFT 
From the Department of Experimental Biology, Rockefeller Institute, New York 
THIRTY FIGURES 
Ever since the rediscovery of Mendel’s law, students of heredity 
who have investigated characters in the adult have habitually 
sought to determine whether or not these characters were inherited 
according to the Mendelian formula. Those, however, who have 
investigated the inheritance of larval and embryonal characters 
have usually not considered the facts from the Mendelian point 
of view but have sought to determine whether the inheritance was 
maternal or paternal. While it is possible that this point of view 
may be the most fruitful one from which to regard hybrids of 
distantly related species; still the work of Loeb, King, and Moore,! 
showed that for the larvae of closely related sea-urchins, at any 
rate, the Mendelian point of view could be adopted with profit. 
They found that in the larvae obtained by crossing Stronglyo- 
centrotus purpuratus and S. franciscanus certain characters of 
each species were dominant over the allelomorphic character in 
the other species, and the result was the same no matter whether 
the character in question was maternal or paternal. On account 
of the wealth of teleost material in Woods Hole and its favorable 
character for such investigations it was suggested by Dr. Loeb, 
whose constant helpfulness during the course of the work I wish 
to acknowledge, that I take up the study of inheritance in Fundu- 
lus from the Mendelian and the physiological points of view. 
Previous work on Mendelian inheritance of this form is limited 
to the paper by Newman? who came to the conclusion that 
1 Arch. f. Entwick-mech. 1910, Bd. 29, p. 354. 
2 Jour. Exp. Zool., vol. 5, p. 503. 
THE JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL ZOOLOGY, VOL. 12, NO. 2 
FEBRUARY, 1912 
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