No. 582] SHORTER ARTICLES AND DISCUSSION 37U 



and 147. Twins are probably distinguishable by their hand- 

 writing oftener than by their physical appearance ; for I am con- 

 fident that the bodies of at least five and probably more of these 

 72 twins would have been as hard to tell apart from a minute's 

 visual inspection as specimens 145 and 147. Of people in general 

 this would probably not hold true, but the distinguishing value 

 of a specimen of natural writing is very high even for them. 



Edward L. Thorndtke 



Teachers College, 



ALLELOMORPHS AND MICE 



In the February number of this journal. C. C. Little points out 

 that Cuenot (1903) recognized certain factors in mice as allelo- 

 morphic, 1 and that in my paper of 1914 I not only failed to men- 

 tion that Cuenot had treated these factors in this way. but that I 

 claimed to have brought forward for the first time a demonstra- 

 tion of the allelomorphism in question. In fact. I did overlook or 

 had forgotten that Cuenot interpreted these types in this way; 

 and curiously enough, my work was undertaken because Little 

 on the alleged results of some of his own earlier experiments 

 denied that the factors for yellow and gray are completely linked, 

 despite Cuenot \s evidence, then published, which Little now says 

 established from the ratios obtained that the factors in question 

 are allelomorphic.- Little wrote as late as 1913: 



;i 1 lei. »m. .]■; ihio to black. 



If this is the conclusion at which he arrived after his elaborate 

 series of experiments and after Cuenot 's work had been done, 

 the need of further work would seem to be obvious. 



The failure of several of us to fully appreciate the significance 

 of Cuenot 's statements and evidence in regard to allelomorphism 

 may in part be due to the fact that in his second paper Cuenot had 

 used the symbols G (gray) and N (black) as allelomorphs, and had 

 besides used the sjTnbols A (albino) and G (gray) as allelomorphs 

 without, however, intending to mean that there was here a set of 



iNote 1903, Archiv. Zool. Exp. et Gen. (4), I. 



2 The numerical results are the same for complete linkage and for multiple 

 allelomorphs. The evidence that would disprove the one would also disprove 

 the other. 



