CHARACTERS REPRESENTED BY ENTITIES 175 



may all differ from each other. The wild grey rabbit must 

 be treated somewhat differently if this conception is correct. 

 The grey is a racial character representing a general poten- 

 tiality of the race. The 20 entities will therefore represent 

 individual variations away from the common racial char- 

 acters, the mean being kept to by the unchecked influence 

 of bi-parental reproduction and natural selection. Its 20 

 entities may therefore represent different kinds of greyness, 

 some darker and some lighter than the mean. A few may 

 even be departures from grey, arising de novo as individual 

 variations, or being derived from some ancestor. They should 

 therefore all be represented as X. It is obvious that where 

 alternative transmission takes place the sexual elements can 

 individually contain only half the entities representing the 

 alternative characters that are contained in the cells forming 

 the body of the parent. The number of entities contained 

 in the sexual elements of the albino rabbit cannot be more 

 than 10, and may vary from 10A to 5B+5X. These are 

 the two extremes, but of course any 10 entities that can 

 be derived from lOA-f 5B+5X mav b e contained in the 

 gametes. The X's in the wild rabbit may each represent a 

 different kind of grey, or any number of them up to 20 

 may represent the same kind of grey. It is extraordinarily 

 improbable that any of the gametes of the albino rabbit 

 would contain nothing but the character A. They would 

 almost certainly contain one or two B's or X's. In the first 

 generation the obvious chances are that greys would pre- 

 dominate. Even did a gamete containing 10 A fuse with 

 one containing 10X, albinism is generally a recessive char- 

 acter, and the individual produced would be grey. In the 

 succeeding generations produced by inbreeding from the 

 hybrids, the chances of individuals being produced with a 

 predominating number of A's would be roughly Mendelian, 

 but none of them would be quite pure. The same explana- 

 tion would apply to the black, although of course fewer 

 black individuals would be produced. A similar explana- 

 tion applies equally in the case of the flowers. It also 



