792 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXV. No. 646 



farm of Mr. E. Arnaud, Monett, Mo. Mr. 

 Arnaud maintains a herd of sheep and with 

 them keeps two goats, a male and a female. 

 There is only one female goat on the place, 

 and she brought a kid three weeks after the 

 animal in question was born. The hybrid is 

 a twin to a lamb that is not a hybrid. The 

 maternity of the supposed hybrid is not abso- 

 lutely certain. Mr. Arnaud found the lambs 

 when they were perhaps an hour old. No 

 other sheep or goats were near, though there 

 were others within the same enclosure. The 

 ewe evidently regarded both the animals as 

 her progeny. The twins are inseparable, one 

 being an ordinary lamb, the other in most 

 respects a goat. The tail is intermediate in 

 length between that of a sheep and a goat, 

 and the ears closely resemble those of a sheep. 

 The coat is apparently that of a goat. The 

 male goat on the farm is of mixed breeding 

 and is white with a few reddish hairs showing 

 on the upper part of the neck. The supposed 

 hybrid has most of the hairs of the body of 

 this reddish color. Mixed with them are much 

 shorter hairs which appear like white wool. 

 They have not yet been submitted to examina- 

 tion to ascertain their real nature. 



While the evidence is not absolutely con- 

 clusive, there is strong reason for believing 

 this individual to be a hybrid. Mr. Arnaud 

 fully appreciates the importance of the freak, 

 and will preserve it for future study and ex- 

 periment. The writer would greatly appre- 

 ciate information concerning other hybrids of 

 this character. W. J. Spillman 



U. S. Dbpaetment of Agriculture 



SPECIAL ARTICLES 

 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LATENT CHARACTERS* 



Those of you who were present at the last 

 annual meeting of the Botanical Society, at 

 New Orleans, will remember that I presented 

 a paper upon the latent characters of a white 

 bean, showing that the appearance of two new 

 characters in the F^ hybrid ofPspring of a 

 white bean when crossed with a plain brown 

 or yellow bean, demonstrated the presence of 



'Read before the Botanical Society of America, 

 at New York, December 29, 1906. 



a color-pattern, and of a pigment-changer as 

 ' latent ' characters in the white bean, latency 

 meaning simply invisibility and not dormancy. 

 On this basis it was predicted that in the 

 second generation five forms would appear ac- 

 cording to the well-known tripolyhybrid ratio, 

 27 :9 :9 :3 :16. These forms in the order of the 

 ratio are purple mottled, black (dark purple), 

 brown mottled, brown, and white. I show you 

 to-day samples of these five predicted types 

 taken from the second generation. 



The ratios of these several groups have not 

 yet been determined because not all of the 

 material has been worked over, but the pres- 

 ence of the predicted types — especially the 

 presence of the two forms, plain black and 

 brown mottled, which were not known to have 

 ever occurred in the ancestry on either side — 

 sufficiently demonstrates the correctness of my 

 interpretation of the allelomorphie composi- 

 tion of the parents. Some additional unex- 

 pected types were found which must await 

 further breeding experiments before their sig- 

 nificance can be profitably discussed. 



It will be remembered that the condition I 

 assumed for these hybrid beans was used to 

 bring into harmony with simple Mendelian 

 hybrids the apparently anomalous results of 

 Tschermak, Emerson, Lock, Bateson, Correns, 

 Cuenot and Castle. The prediction that the 

 same conception of latent characters in the 

 sense of invisible, not inactive ones would 

 without doubt give a solution to the intricate 

 and otherwise apparently inexplicable behavior 

 of stocks and sweet-peas, as studied by Bate- 

 son, was fulfilled with unexpected promptness, 

 as the third report' to the Evolution Commit- 

 tee presented in March, 1906, and published 

 later in the same year, adopts the same theory 

 and shows that in this way practically all of 

 the apparent anomalies of stocks and sweet- 

 peas may be explained upon the simple basis 

 of typical Mendelian behavior without re- 

 course to the hypallelomorphs or compound 

 units earlier assumed by Bateson. 



- Bateson, W., Saunders, Miss E. E., Punnett, 

 R. 0., ' Experimental Studies in the Physiology 

 of Heredity,' Reports to the Evolution Committee 

 of the Royal Society, Report III., 53 pp., London, 

 1906. 



