HEREDITY 309 



Everard Millais. He offered me every facility. The 

 Basset Hound records referring- to his own and other 

 breeds had been carefully kept, and the Stud Book 

 he lent me contained accounts of nearly 1000 animals, 

 of which I was able to utilise 817. All were 

 descended from parents of known colours ; in 567 

 of them the colours of all four grandparents were 

 also known. Wherever the printed Stud Book was 

 deficient, Sir Everard Millais supplied the want in 

 MS from the original records. My inquiry was into 

 the heredity of two alternative colours, one containing 

 no black, the other containing it ; their technical 

 names were lemon-white and tri-colour (black, lemon, 

 white) respectively. I was assured that no difficulty 

 was felt in determining the category to which each 

 individual belonged. These data were fully dis- 

 cussed in a memoir, published ( 1 897) in the Proceedings 

 of the Royal Society [138], on what is now termed 

 the ''Ancestral Law," namely, that the average contri- 

 bution of each parent is ^, of each grandparent iV, 

 and so on. Or, in other words, that of the two 

 parents taken together is J, of the four grandparents 

 together \, and so on. My data were not as 

 numerous as is desirable, still the results were closely 

 congruous, and seem to be a near approximation to 

 the truth. The conclusions have been much dis- 

 cussed and criticised, and they have been modified 

 by Professor Karl Pearson ; but they have not been 

 seriously shaken, so far as I know. 



