2 9 



of evil as it does in the opposite case to produce an 

 inheritance of good." 



Such are the formularies which experience has shown 

 to include most of the phenomena of heredity ; and they 

 may be regarded as so many fragments of a single law, of 

 which we are sensible, but which we cannot rightly under- 

 stand. The empiric formularies already referred to may 

 be further reduced to mediate and immediate heredity, and 

 thus, instead of regarding heredity as from one generation 

 to another, we may regard it as embracing a much larger 

 cycle. That heredity thus embraces cycles is amply shown 

 amongst the lower animals, although no instances of 

 alternate generation are known amongst vertebrates. 



With regard to cases of reversional heredity, when the 

 grandson resembles the grandfather, the grandnephew the 

 granduncle, the intermediate stages being totally unlike 

 either, the phenomena may be explained by the fact that 

 these resemblances have been preserved in the latent state 

 by the intermediate generations, and then what appears to 

 be mediate heredity is really immediate. Latent characters 

 are "those secondary characters of each sex which lie 

 dormant in the opposite sex, ready to be evolved under 

 peculiar circumstances." z The law of heredity is in latent, 

 albeit not in patent, action. This latency or dormancy of 

 ancestral qualities, that afterwards wakes again to open 

 activity, is proof that the effect of the union of two persons 

 may be to hold special qualities of each other in a sort of 

 neutralisation or check, released from which they show 

 themselves again, just as an element in a chemical compound 

 exhibits its own properties again as soon as it is free. 2 



2 Dr. Maudsley. 



