HEREDITARY VARIATION 73 



let us see what were the results. Salvator had four 

 children ; they were two boys, a girl, and another boy : 

 the first two boys and the girl were six-fingered and six- 

 toed like their grandfather ; the fourth boy had only five 

 fingers and five toes. George had only four children : 

 there were two girls with six fingers and six toes ; there 

 was one girl with six fingers and five toes on the right 

 side, and five fingers and five toes on the left side, so that 

 she was half and half. The last, a boy, had five fingers 

 and five toes. The third, Andre, you will recollect, was 

 perfectly well-formed, and he had many children whose 

 hands and feet were all regularly developed. Marie, the 

 last, who, of course, married a man who had only five 

 fingers, had four children : the first, a boy, was born with 

 six toes, but the other three were normal. 



Now observe what very extraordinary phenomena are 

 presented here. You have an accidental variation arising 

 from what you may call a monstrosity ; you have that 

 monstrosity tendency or variation diluted in the first 

 instance by an admixture with a female of normal con- 

 struction, and you would naturally expect that, in the 

 results of such an union, the monstrosity, if repeated, 

 would be in equal proportion with the normal type ; that 

 is to say, that the children would be half and half, some 

 taking the peculiarity of the father, and the others being 

 of the purely normal type of the mother ; but you see we 

 have a great preponderance of the abnormal type. Well, 

 this comes to be mixed once more with the pure, the 

 normal type, and the abnormal is again produced in large 

 proportion, notwithstanding the second dilution. Now 

 what would have happened if these abnormal types had 

 intermarried with each other ; that is to say, suppose the 

 two boys of Salvator had taken it into their heads to 

 marry their first cousins, the two first girls of George, their 

 uncle ? You will remember that these are all of the 

 abnormal type of their grandfather. The result would 

 probably have been, that their offspring would have been 

 in every case a further development of that abnormal type. 

 You see it is only in the fourth, in the person of Marie, 

 that the tendency, when it appears but slightly in the 

 second generation, is washed out in the third, while the 

 progeny of Andre, who escaped in the first instance, escape 

 altogether. 



We have in this case a good example of nature's tendency 



