Eimer on Growth and Inheritance 435 



He strongly combats the idea that mere vitihty will 

 Lccount for the characters of organisms, and pertinently 

 remarks : — ^ 



I 



^f * There can be nothing indeed more splendid in colour than the 

 iridescence of Labradorite, and is this useful to the stone, and are 

 colour and brightness useful to gold and countless other minerals? 

 Are they useful to the soap-bubble % ' 



In stating his views as to the influence of fathers and 

 mothers, respectively, on their families, he makes some 

 interesting remarks concerning what he believes to be the 

 gradual extension of dark hair and eyes amongst the Ger- 

 manic races. He says : — ^ 



' Dark and fair parents together do not usually produce children 

 which in colour are intermediate between them, but fair and dark 

 again. Dark, however, according to my observations, has a pre- 

 ponderance over fair. When it is once there it is not easily eradicated 

 from the blood. . . . The length of time for which the dark and the 

 blond type can constantly recur separately in the children of light 

 and dark complexioned j^arents is particularly well shown by several 

 South German villages, like those in the immediate neighbourhood 

 of Tubingen, where a thoroughly dark, almost Romance, and a purely 

 Germanic race of people appear often enough sharply distinguished in 

 the children of one and the same family — notwithstanding the fact 

 that in these little villages, intermixture is continually taking place, 

 for the people usually marry among one another, and seldom outside 

 the village. . . . That darkness of hair and eyes is, among us, some- 

 thing newly ingrafted, and is on the increase, is proved by the univers- 

 ally known fact that the children of dark German parents are, as a 

 rule, in the earlier years of life, fair, and have blue or grey eyes; 

 here also characters which were dominant in the ancestors are repeated 

 in youth. This biogenetic fact struck me first, and very forcibly, in 

 the Tipper Engadine, where obviously an intermixture of blonde 

 Germans with dark Romans has taken place, and where it is the more 

 surprising because the climate in that region would favour rather 

 lightness of colour. For example, in the neighbourhood of Sils- 

 Maria, in villages where the adults are all perfectly Romance in 



1 P. 34. - P. 36. 



