IS THIS SIRE PREPOTENT? 
A West African Negro, his English wife, and their nine children. 
To a white observer, the 
father would appear at first sight to be prepotent, in determining the visible characters of 
the offspring; but, says a member of this association, “these children resemble their mother 
as well as their father. 
of nose and thickness of lips. 
as those of the father.” 
the Negro and the Chinese are ‘“‘prepotent’’ in crosses with the white race. 
Journal of Genetics, II, 2. (Fig. 20.) 
further cites on the authority of Gartner 
some species crosses of Nicotiana (to- 
bacco), stating that N. vinceflore is 
prepotent in crosses with N. paniculata, 
but that in crosses with N. quadrivalvis 
the latter is prepotent. Numerous and 
extensive studies made in recent years 
of Nicotiana hybrids show beyond ques- 
tion that the prepotency (dominance) 
inheres in single characters, not in the 
characters of either parent as a group. 
The same is in all probability true of 
horse-ass hybrids, but the sterility of 
all such hybrids has precluded demon- 
strative breeding tests. 
On the whole we find in Darwin’s ex- 
amples abundant illustrations of Men- 
delian unit-character inheritance, but 
no clear case of anything else. Darwin 
The children are of intermediate skin-color, hair form, breadth 
The characters of the mother are as truly dominant 
He therefore considers it ambiguous and inaccurate to say that 
After Bond, 
was evidently confused on the subject; 
and of course he knew nothing about 
Mendelism. He failed to distinguish be- 
tween prepotency of one or more char- 
acters in an individual and prepotency of 
the individual as a whole. 
. The live-stock breeders of the present 
day likewise fail to make this distinction. 
In general, they speak as if prepotency 
were a function of the individual. 
Many modern geneticists object to this 
attitude, holding it to be vague and 
confusing; they are unable to picture 
clearly to themselves any way in which 
an animal could be prepotent as a 
whole, although their work with differ- 
ent unit-characters leads them easily 
to understand that an animal might 
have a number of prepotent or, tech- 
Jo 
