Appendix II. 205 



quotation, the remmbrance of a remark I heard many years 

 ago concerning dogs, led to the inquiry whether they furnished 

 analogous evidence. It occurred to me that a friend who is 

 frequently appointed judge of animals at agricultural shows, 

 Mr. Fookes, of Fairfield, Pewsey, Wiltshire, might know some- 

 thing about the matter. A letter to him brought various 

 confirmatory statements. From one " who had bred dogs for 

 many years " he learnt that — 



It is a well-known and admitted fact that if a bitch has two litters 

 by two different dogs, the character of the first father is sure to be 

 perpetuated in any litters she may afterwards have, no matter how 

 pure-bred a dog may be the begetter. 



After citing this testimony, Mr. Fookes goes on to give illustra- 

 tions known to himself. 



A friend of mine near this had a very valuable Dachshund bitch, 

 which most unfortunately had a litter by a stray sheep-dog The next 

 year her owner sent her on a visit to a pure Dachshund dog, but the 

 produce took quite as much of the first father as the second, and the 

 next year he sent her to another Duchshund with the same result. 

 Another case : — A friend of mine in Devizes had a litter of puppies, 

 unsought for, by a setter from a favourite pointer bitch, and after this 

 she never bred any true pointers, no matter of what the paternity was. 



These further evidences, to which Mr. Fookes has since 

 added others, render the general conclusion incontestable. 

 Coming from remote places, from those who have no theory to 

 support, and who are some of them astonished by the unexpected 

 phenomena, the agreement dissipates all doubt. In four kinds 

 of mammals, widely divergent in their natures — man, horse, dog, 

 and pig — we have this same seemingly anomalous kind of 

 heredity made visible under analogous conditions. We must 

 take it as a demonstrated fact that, during gestation, traits 

 of constitution inherited from the father produce effects upon 

 the constitution of the mother ; and that these communicated 

 effects are transmitted by her to subsequent offspring. We are 

 supplied with an absolute disproof of Prolessor Weismann's 

 doctrine that the reproductive cells are independent of, and 

 uninfluenced by, the somatic cells ; and there disappears abso- 

 lutely the alleged obstacle to the transmission of acquired 

 characters. . . . 



