several Ancestor to the total Heritage of the Offspring. 403 



It should noted that nothing in this statistical law contradicts the 

 generally accepted view that the chief, if not the sole, line of descent 

 runs from germ to germ and not from person to person. The person 

 may be accepted on the whole as a fair representative of the germ, 

 and, being so, the statistical laws which apply to the persons would 

 apply to the germs also, though with less precision in individual cases. 

 Now this law is strictly consonant with the observed binary sub- 

 divisions of the germ cells, and the concomitant extrusion and loss of 

 one-half of the several contributions from each of the two parents to 

 the germ-cell of the offspring. The apparent artificiality of the law 

 ceases on these grounds to afford cause for doubt ; its close agree- 

 ment with physiological phenomena ought to give a prejudice in 

 favour of its truth rather than the contrary. 



Again, a Avide though limited range of observation assures us that 

 the occupier of each ancestral place may contribute something of his 

 own personal peculiarity, apart from all others, to the heritage of 

 the offspring. Therefore there is such a thing as an average contri- 

 bution appropriate to each ancestral place, which admits of statist- 

 ical valuation, however minute it may be. It is also well known 

 that the more remote stages of ancestry contribute considerably less 

 than the nearer ones. Further, it is reasonable to believe that the 

 contributions of parents to children are in the same proportion 

 as those of the grandparents to the parents, of the great- grand- 

 parents to the grandparents, and so on ; in short, that their total 

 amount is to be expressed by the sum of the terms in an infinite geo- 

 metric series diminishing to zero. Lastly, it is an essential condition 

 that their total amount should be equal to 1, in order to account for 

 the whole of the heritage. All these conditions are fulfilled by the 

 series o£ ^ + i 2 + i 3 + &c, and by no other. These and the foregoing 

 considerations wore referred to when saying that the law might 

 be inferred with considerable assurance a priori; consequently, 

 being found true in the particular case about to be stated, there is 

 good reason to accept the law in a general sense. 



The Bassets are dwarf blood-hounds, of two, and only two, recog- 

 nised varieties of colour. Excluding, as I have done, a solitary 

 exception of black and tan, they are either white, with large blotches 

 ranging between red and yellow, or they may in addition be marked 

 with more or less black. In the former case they are technically 

 known and registered as "lemon and white," in the latter case as 

 " tricolour." Tricolour is, in fact, the introduction of melanism, so I 

 shall treat the colours simply as being "tricolour" or " non -tri- 

 colour;" more briefly, as T. or 1ST. I am assured that transitional 

 cases between T. and N". are very rare, and that experts would 

 hardly ever disagree about the class to which any particular hound 

 should be assigned. A stud-book is published from time to time 



