206 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 
known, occurs also very frequently, though in a less degree, 
in human families. Every one of my readers doubtless 
knows some members of a family who, in this or that pecu- 
liarity, much more resemble the grandfather or grandmother 
than the father or mother. Sometimes it lies in bodily 
peculiarities, for example, features of face, colour of hair, 
size of body—sometimes in mental qualities, for example, 
temperament, energy, understanding—which are trans- 
mitted in this manner. This fact may be observed in 
‘domestic animals as well as in the case of man. Among 
the domestic animals most liable to vary—as the dog, | 
horse, and ox—breeders very frequently find that the pro- 
duct by breeding resembles the grandparents far more than 
it does its own parental organism. If we express this 
general law and the succession of generations by the letters 
of the alphabet, then A—=C=—E, whilst B—D—F, and 
so on. 
This very remarkable fact appears in a more striking 
way in the lower animals and plants than in the 
higher, and especially in the well-known phenomenon of 
alternation of generations (metagenesis). Here we very 
frequently find—for example, among the Planarian worms, 
sea-squirts or Tunicates, Zoophytes, and also among ferns 
and mosses—that the organic individual in the first place 
produces, by propagation, a form completely different 
from the parental form, and that only the descendants of 
this generation, again, become like the first. This regular 
change of generation was discovered by the poet Chamisso, 
on his voyage round the world in 1819, among the Salpa, 
cylindrical tunicates, transparent like glass, which float on 
the surface of the sea. Here the larger generation, the in- 
