66 INHERITANCE IN SILKWORMS, I 



of view today, i. e. the Mendelian point of view), the more numerous 

 and various and pronounced and confusing (or illuminating if we are 

 simply searching for truth and not the truth of a single hypothesis) 

 these inconsistencies become. 



On the other hand it is also a point not to be overlooked that these 

 inconsistencies are only put into the conspicuous position they occupy 

 by the strong and suggestive tendency through all the silkworm hered- 

 ity towards Mendelian behavior. And it may very well be that some 

 more thorough-going student and more subtle interpreter than I of 

 inheritance phenomena will be able to analyze many of the phenomena 

 which seem to me to be inconsistencies and exceptions to the Mendelian 

 principles in such a way as to reveal the possibility if not actuality 

 of their basic consistency with these principles. Professor Bateson has 

 exhibited so much ingenuity in analysis of the various apparently un- 

 conformable cases of inheritance presented to him that a student less 

 well grounded and less gifted can not venture to be too certain in the 

 interpretation of his data. By the addition of the hypothesis of deter- 

 miners and cryptomeres to a keen analysis of the data offered him, 

 Bateson has most plausibly brought into line with Mendelism numer- 

 ous at first sight non-Mendelian cases. Very well. He has now on 

 hand for treatment apparently unconformable new data and interpreta- 

 tions from both Davenport and myself. 



This reference to Davenport's results and conclusions leads me 

 directly to say that on the whole my results with the silkworm and 

 my interpretations of and conclusions from these results are very much 

 like those of his, derived from his extended work with poultry. With 

 Davenport, I find dominance and recessiveness often incomplete; pre- 

 potency as truly important as dominance ; the theory of gametic purity 

 not borne out with any rigorousness by the data of crossings. Differ- 

 ing from him, I find reciprocal crosses (on basis of sex) not exhibiting 

 important or consistent differences in inheritance; where such differ- 

 ences in reciprocal cross results occur they can more readily be ranked 

 in the category of "individual idiosyncrasies" than in the category of 

 sex influence. I find no special evidence to favor Conklin and Guyer's 

 contention for a larger influence in inheritance on the part of the female 

 because of the larger mass of cytoplasm in the female germ cells. 

 Indeed Miss McCracken finds in her intensive study of the inheritance 

 in silkworms of larval melanism and imaginal polyvoltinism that if 

 either sex shows any prepotency it is the male sex. 



I find much more inheritance difference on a basis of strain or race 



