THE LA WS OF HEREDITY. 69 



child may show little or no trace of resemblance to one 

 of its parents, the influence of that parent must not be 

 taken as absent, for the characters peculiar to that 

 parent may be only lying latent in the child, ready to 

 appear in the next, or some more remote, generation. 

 If any one will look around among his relatives and 

 friends he will have little difficulty in discovering cases 

 in proof of this, such, for example, as where a son, who 

 apparently in no way resembles his mother, begets 

 daughters in whom the peculiar characters of their 

 grandmother, although absent in their father, are re- 

 produced with striking truthfulness. But this will be 

 fully considered under Eeversional Heredity. 



In direct heredity there is, then, in nearly every 

 case, a preponderance of resemblance to one or other of 

 the parents, and this preponderance runs in two ways. 

 I. Direct, that is, from father to son and mother to 

 daughter;. and 2. Diagonally, from father to daughter 

 and from mother to son. Here again the reader will 

 find little difficulty in discovering families which will 

 act as illustrations, for it is a matter of common remark 

 that in some families the sons resemble closely the 

 father and the daughters the mother, while in others 

 the sons have, as a rule, a peculiar resemblance to the 

 mother and the daughters to the father. This will be 

 more easily followed in cases in which the peculiar 

 family character takes the form of some gross variation, 

 as, say, epilepsy or scrofula. In such cases, if the 

 heredity be direct and the father be the parent bearing 

 the taint, the sons will be epileptic or scrofulous, while 



