XXXll GENERAL INTEODDCTION. 



had a dark muzzle it is conceivable some of the Himalaya 

 blood came from the paternal great-grandfather. Many 

 other instances of reversion in rabbits might be given, 

 some of which exactly agree with cases of reversion 

 commonly supposed to occur in the human family. 



These rabbit experiments lend poM^erful support to the 

 view that a child may be the image of its grandmother, 

 or of its great-grandmother, while the new foal of the 

 Iceland skew-bald pony, to be further referred to, affords 

 very strong testimony in favour of the belief that a child 

 may be the image of its own mother. 



That only one of the fifty descendants of the white buck 

 took after his dam {i. e. after their grandmother), while all 

 the others but one resembled his sire {i. e. their grand- 

 father), shows that experiments of this kind must be 

 conducted on a fairly large scale to be of any use. The 

 maternal grandparent was probably represented by ger- 

 minal units in all the fifty descendants of the white buck, 

 but only in one were they sufficiently potent or suffi- 

 ciently plentiful in the ripe male germ-cell, or sufficiently 

 lucky to obtain complete control during the co-mingling 

 of the units of protoplasm that accompanies and forms 

 the essential pai't of fertilisation. 



Two reflections that flow from a contemplation of the 

 solitary " restored " Angora may, though somewhat out 

 of place, here be mentioned. The first is, had the doe 

 of the solitary young Angora been previously mated with 

 an Angora buck, she would probably have been cited 

 as a case of "infection," provided of course the breeding 

 of the buck had not been recorded. 



The other reflection may take the form of a question. 

 If only one out of fifty (i. e. 2 per cent.) of the offspring 

 take after the grandmother, how many of the offspring 

 (supposing there is such a thing as telegony) might be 

 expected to take after the previous sire, whose influence 

 must presumably count for infinitely less than that of an 

 ancestor only one generation removed ? 



I think the answer might be, at least for rabbits, not 

 more than 1 per cent, of the offspring. It will be re- 



