44 CATTLE-BREEDING. 



ilar ones. Thus we are informed by a good 

 authority that a polled breed in the Corrientes 

 not infrequently produced animals with small, 

 "misshapen, and sometimes unattached horns. 



In treating of this question of atavism I have 

 purposely chosen to follow the line indicated 

 by Mr. Darwin in the quotation made at the 

 beginning of this chapter. He practically treats 

 it as the reversion to some ancestor more re- 

 mote than the grandparents. This is calculated 

 to show the more extreme instances of the 

 action of the law, and like all extreme 'cases 

 these are especially valuable as illustrations. 

 Other writers, however, make the term atavism 

 to apply to all reversions to an ancestor more 

 distant than the parents. Of these the French 

 writer on heredity, M. Ribot, is an eminent ex- 

 ample. In defining atavism ("Heredity," p. 166,) 

 he says: "Whenever a child, instead of resem- 

 bling his immediate parents, resembles one of 

 his grandparents, or some still more rempte an- 

 cestor, or even some distant member of a col- 

 lateral branch of the family a circumstance 

 which must be attributed to the descent of all 

 its members from a common ancestor this is 

 called a case of atavism." Under so broad a 

 definition as this all those cases where a grand- 

 son inherits through his mother his grand- 

 father's peculiarities of physical and mental 

 character, and a granddaughter her grand- 



