ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF INSTINCTS. 199 



" In Chapter VII I have given some facts showing that 

 when races or species are crossed there is a tendency in the 

 crossed offspring, from quite unknown causes, to revert to 

 ancestral characters. A suspicion has crossed me that a 

 slight tendency to primeval wildness sometimes thus appears 

 in crossed animals. Mr. Garnett in a letter to me states that 

 his hybrids from the musk and common duck 'evinced a 

 singular tendency to wildness.' Waterton (' Essays on 

 Natural History,' p. 197) says that in his duck, a cross 

 between the wild and the tame, ' their wariness w^as quite 

 remarkable.' Mr. Hewitt, who has bred more hybrids 

 between pheasants and fowls than any other man, in letters 

 to me speaks in the strongest terms of their wild, bad, and 

 troublesome dispositions ; and this was the case with some 

 which I have seen. Captain Hutton made nearly the same 

 remark to me in regard to the crossed offspring from a tame 

 goat and a wild species from the western Himalaya. Lord 

 Powis' agent, without my having asked him the question, 

 remarked to me that the crossed animals from the domestic' 

 Indian Bull and common cow ' were more wild than the 

 thorough-bred breed.' I do not suppose that this increased 

 wildness is invariable; it does not seem to be the case, 

 according to Mr. Eyton, with the crossed offspring from the 

 common and Chinese geese; nor, according to Mr. Brent, 

 with crossed breeds from the Canary." 



