58 THE MENDEL JOURNAL 



purposes, and can be seen with sufficient distinctness 

 running through the phenomena of Hfe. These are the 

 facts that I would like now to bring to your attention. 

 When a tall person marries a short person, or one 

 of sweet temper marries one of a bad temper, there 

 are three conceivable possibilities as to the nature 

 of the immediate offspring. We can imagine that 

 tallness and shortness, or sweetness and badness, 

 will blend with each other in each case, and produce 

 offspring not as tall or as sweet as one parent, nor 

 as short or as bad-tempered as the other. Let us 

 call this the hypothesis of " blended inheritance." 

 We can, however, imagine another alternative, and 

 conceive that some of the offspring may be like one 

 parent and some like the other, or that, under certain 

 circumstances, all the offspring in one generation 

 may be like one of the parents only, those which 

 resemble the other parent, in the particular character 

 considered, appearing in the next or later generations. 

 In such a case there has been no blending of the two 

 alternative characters, for they have passed on to 

 the next or later generations distinct from each 

 other, each retaining its own feature of distinction. 

 Let us call this the hypothesis of " segregated or 

 alternative inheritance." The third alternative is 

 that the union of two characters in marriage shall 

 produce an offspring showing a new quality, different 

 from the two which by their union produced it. 

 We may call this " diapheromorphic inheritance." 

 There is yet a fourth possibility, which can, however, 

 only occur with certain characters. The bodies of 



