

INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 7 
marked race. The following is Darwin’s account of the 
occurrence :— 
‘*In some few instances new breeds have suddenly originated ; thus, in 
1791, a ram lamb was born in Massachusetts, having short crooked legs and a 
long back, like a turn-spit dog. From this one lamb the ofter or ancon semi- 
monstrous breed was raised. As these sheep could not leap over the fences, it 
was thought that they would be valuable, but they have been supplanted by 
Merinos, and thus exterminated. The sheep are remarkable from transmitting 
their character so truly that Coionel Humphreys never heard of ‘but one 
questionable case’ of an ancon ram and ewe not producing ancon offspring. 
When they are crossed with other breeds the offspring, with rare exceptions, 
instead of being intermediate in character, perfectly resemble either parent ; 
even one of twins has resembled one parent and the second the other. Lastly, 
“the ancons have been observed to keep together, separating themselves from 
the rest of the flock when put into enclosures with other sheep.’ ”’* 
This is a very marked instance of a single variation 
which was not swamped by intercrossing, but on the other 
hand impressedt its characteristics upon large numbers of 
descendants, and there would be still less chance of any 
swamping action in the more ordinary cases of variation 
where probably a small group of individuals would be 
found all varying more or less in the one direction. Dr. 
Romanes complains (loc. cit., p. 343) that Darwin assumes 
that a new variety would consist of a number of similarly 
modified individuals, and admits that ‘‘if this assumption 
were granted, there would be an end of the present 
difficulty,’ i.e. of his objection to natural selection, on 
account of intercrossing ; but in the first place the assump- 
tion is not unwarranted, and secondly Romanes makes 
precisely the same assumption himself a few pages further 
on in his paper,{ in supporting his own theory of physio- 
* «“Animals and Plants under Domestication,” vol. i., p. 104. 
+ By artificial selection, but the case of the highly favoured white man and 
his whitish descendants discussed above is also practically a case of artificial 
selection, and I only bring up the ancon sheep as an argument against Prof. 
_Jenkin’s conclusion. 
+ Romanes, loc. cit., p. 352. 
