332 The Journal 
nically, dominant characters, and there- 
fore seem to be prepotent as an 
individual. 
“But,’’ writes my correspondent, ‘if 
there really exist, as Darwin supposed 
and as the literature of breeding based 
on pre-Mendelian conceptions implies, 
individuals or races having superior 
power of hereditary transmission as 
regards all their characters, their exist- 
ence must be regarded as of the greatest 
theoretical interest and practical import- 
ance, and no effort should be spared to 
discover them.”’ 
THE CASE OF BRIGHAM YOUNG 
The illustration of Brigham Young 
in the February issue of this journal, 
seemed to my correspondent to be an 
attempt to demonstrate a case of indi- 
vidual prepotency. As a fact, I ex- 
pressed no opinion as to whether the 
prepotency was general or was confined 
to certain characters; I enumerated 
certain characters as indications of 
prepotency and left the reader to 
interpret them as he liked. Shape 
of mouth and nose were mentioned as 
being strikingly alike in father and 
daughters, and a friend of the Young 
family was quoted as saying that “‘all 
the daughters are distinctly Youngs in 
feature, voice, appearance and tempera- 
ment. None is great as their 
father was great, but all are Youngs.”’ 
Interpreting this as a claim of general 
or individual prepotency, my corre- 
spondent writes: 
“Ts the case of Brigham Young evi- 
dence of individual or racial prepotency ? 
The evidence is incomplete. We may 
admit that the daughters look like 
their father. Most daughters do. They 
probably also look like their mothers. 
We have no means of judging whether 
they look more like one parent than the 
other, because the picture of the other 
parent is not given for comparison. 
Yet this is the very point on which we 
are asked to pass judgment. The jury 
calls for Exhibit B, the pictures of the 
mothers, before bringing in a verdict. 
‘There are in the group of daughters, 
according to the legend, three pairs of 
full sisters. These. three pairs are 
plainly more like each other in features 
of Heredity 
and expression than any other pairs 
which can be formed within the group. 
This fact shows that the mother as well 
as the father had influence in determin- 
ing the features of these daughters. 
Which had the greater influence, the 
mother or the father, we have no means 
of judging. 
“The author speaks of shape of nose 
and mouth as being features in which 
resemblance is shown to the father. 
Suppose this be granted. No two have 
noses and mouths exactly alike. Per- 
haps the mothers had something to do 
with these differences. But even if there 
were practical identity between father 
and daughters in shape of nose and 
mouth, we should be dealing with two 
single characters only. These might be 
dominant characters, but that would not 
prove Brigham Young a _ dominant 
parent. 
“Suppose we examine a photograph, 
which Bond (Journal of Genetics, 1912) 
has published, of an English woman, her 
West African husband, and their nine 
children, for evidence of prepotency. 
(See Fig. 20.) The children all have 
dark skin, black curly hair, broad noses 
and thick lips, in all of which features 
they resemble their father. Surely, you 
might say, this is a prepotent sire. But 
these children resemble their mother as 
well as their father. The children are 
of intermediate skin-color, hair form, 
breadth of nose and thickness of lips. 
The characters of the mother are as 
truly dominant as those of the father. 
A white race calls the children black- 
hybrids, but a black race might with 
equal propriety call them white-hybrids. 
A study of later generations would 
probably show also that the several 
characters observed in the children 
vary independently of each other in 
later generations, that they are not a 
group of correlated characters at all.” 
The illustration given is particularly 
pertinent, because anthropologists have 
often spoken of the negro (and also 
the Chinese) as prepotent in racial 
crosses with whites. It cannot be 
denied that this is a loose use of the 
term, which is not likely to be of much 
value to science. I do not consider 
that the illustration of the negro-white 
