Chap. I. UNDER DOMESTICATION. 13 



deviation appears not unfrequently, and we see it in the 

 father and child, we cannot tell whether it may not be 

 due to the same original cause acting on both ; but when 

 amongst individuals, apparently exposed to the same 

 conditions, any very rare deviation, due to some extraor- 

 dinary combination of circumstances, appears in the 

 parent — say, once amongst several million individuals — 

 and it reappears in the child, the mere doctrine of 

 chances almost compels us to attribute its reappearance 

 to inheritance. Every one must have heard of cases of 

 albinism, prickly skin, hairy bodies, &c, appearing in 

 several members of the same family. If strange and 

 rare deviations of structure are truly inherited, less 

 strange and commoner deviations may be freely ad- 

 mitted to be inheritable. Perhaps the correct way of" 

 viewing the whole subject, would be, to look at the in- 

 heritance of every character whatever as the rule, and 

 non-inheritance as the anomaly. 



The laws governing inheritance are quite unknown ; 

 no one can say why the same peculiarity in different 

 individuals of the same species, and in individuals of 

 different species, is sometimes inherited and sometimes 

 not so ; why the child often reverts in certain characters 

 to its grandfather or grandmother or other much more 

 remote ancestor ; why a peculiarity is often transmitted 

 from one sex to both sexes, or to one sex alone, more 

 commonly but not exclusively to the like sex. It is 

 a fact of some little importance to us, that peculi- 

 arities appearing in the males of our domestic breeds 

 are often transmitted either exclusively, or in a much 

 greater degree, to males alone. A much more im- 

 portant rule, which I think may be trusted, is that, at 

 whatever period of life a peculiarity first appears, it 

 tends to appear in the offspring at a corresponding age, 

 though sometimes earlier. In many cases this could 



