LAW OF VARIATION. 51 



born of white parents, but whose mother previous to 

 her marriage bore a mulatto child by a negro man 

 servant, exhibits distinct traces of the negro. Dr. Simp- 

 son, whose patient at one time, the young woman was, 

 recollects being struck with the resemblance, and no- 

 ticed particularly that the hair had the qualities char- 

 acteristic of the negro." 



Dr. Carpenter, in the last edition of his work on phys- 

 iology, says it is by no means an infrequent occurrence 

 for a widow who has married again to bear children 

 resembling her first husband. 



Various explanations have been offered to account 

 for the facts observed, among which the theory of Mr. 

 McGillivray, V. S., which is endorsed by Dr. Harvey, 

 and considered (as we shall presently see) as very 

 probable at least by Dr. Carpenter, seems the most 

 satisfactory. Dr. Harvey says : 



" Instances are sufficiently common among the lower 

 animals where the offspring exhibit more or less dis- 

 tinctly over and beyond the characters of the male by 

 which they were begotten, the peculiarities also of a 

 male by which their mother at some former period had 

 been impregnated. * * * Great difficulty has been 

 felt by physiological writers in regard to the proper 

 explanation of this kind of phenomena. They have 

 been ascribed by some to a permanent impression made 

 somehow by the semen of the first male on the genitals 



