308 MEMORIES OF MY LIFE 



ment. All the moths in the first generation were 



o 



photographed neatly on octavo pages by a friend, 

 Miss Reynolds, and a very great deal of trouble was 

 taken about them, but all in vain. The only consola- 

 tion that I have is that the experiences gained by Mr. 

 Merrifield enabled him to pursue other experiments 

 on moths with great success, which have led to his 

 increased reputation as an entomologist. 



Later still it seemed most desirable to obtain data 

 that would throw light on the Average contribution of 

 each Ancestor to the total heritage of the offspring 

 in a mixed population. This is a purely statistical 

 question, the same answer to which would be given on 

 more than one theoretical hypothesis of heredity, 

 whether it be Pangenetic, Mendel ian, or other. 



I must stop for a moment to pay a tribute to the 

 memory of Mendel, with whom I sentimentally feel 

 myself connected, owing to our having been born in 

 the same year 1822. His careful and long-continued 

 experiments show how much can be performed by 

 those who, like him and Charles Darwin, never or 

 hardly ever leave their homes, and again how much 

 might be done in a fixed laboratory after a uniform 

 tradition of work had been established. Mendel 

 clearly showed that there were such things as alter- 

 native atomic characters of equal potency in descent. 

 How far characters generally may be due to simple, 

 or to molecular characters more or less correlated 

 together, has yet to be discovered. 



I had thought of experimenting with mice, as 

 cheap to rear and very prolific, and had taken some 

 steps to that end, when I became aware of the large 

 collections of Basset Hounds belonging to the late Sir 



