HEREDITARY TRAITS. 213 



resembled the father, while the other the youngest was of 

 the normal type like his mother and grandmother. As 

 these four children were the descendants of four grand 

 parents of whom one only was hexadactylic, we see that the 

 variety had been strong enough in their case to overcome 

 the normal type in threefold greater strength. But the 

 strangest part of the story is that relating to George and 

 Marie. George, who was a pentadactyle, though somewhat 

 deformed about the hands and feet, was the father of four 

 children : first, two girls, both purely hexadactylic ; next, a 

 girl hexadactylic on the right side of the body and penta- 

 dactylic on the left side ; and lastly, a boy, purely penta- 

 dactylic. Marie, a pentadactyle with deformed thumbs, 

 gave birth to a boy with six toes, and three normally formed 

 children. It will be seen, however, that the normal type 

 showed itself in greater force than the variety in the third 

 generation irom Gratio ; for while one child of Salvator's, 

 one of George's, three of Marie's, and all of Andre's 

 (some seven or eight) were of the normal type twelve or 

 thirteen in all only five, viz., three of Salvator's and two of 

 George's, presented the variety purely. Three others were 

 more or less abnormally formed in fingers and toes ; but 

 even counting these, the influence of the variety was shown 

 only in eight of the grandchildren of Gratio, whereas twelve 

 or thirteen were of the normal type. 



The story of the Ancon or Otter sheep, as narrated by 

 Colonel David Humphreys in a letter to Sir Joseph Banks, 

 published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1813, has 

 been thus abridged by Huxley : ' It appears that one Seth 

 Wright, the proprietor of a farm on the banks of the Charles 

 River, in Massachusetts, possessed a flock of fifteen ewes 

 and a ram of the ordinary kind. In the year 1791 one of 

 the ewes presented her owner with a male lamb differing, 

 for no assignable reason, from its parents by a disproportion- 

 ately long body and short bandy legs ; whence it was 

 unable to emulate its relatives in those sportive leaps over 

 the neighbours' fences in which they were in the habit of 



