330 
Miscellanea 
III. Note on the Honduras Piebald. 
By KARL PEARSON, F.R.S. 
The first report of this piebald with photographs was, I believe, brought back to Europe 
by M. le Comte Maurice de Perigny. Professeur R. Blanchard published an account based 
on the Comte de Perigny 's data in the Bulletin de la Societe' francaise d'Histoire de la Me'decine, 
t. ix. p. 213, Paris, 1910. Through the courtesy of the Comte de Perigny I have been provided 
with copies of his photographs, which will appear in the Second Part of the Monograph on 
Albinism soon to be issued by E. Nettleship, C. H. Usher and myself, and are reproduced as 
Plates X. and XI. here. This piebald boy is of much interest because he belongs essentially to 
the " classical type," illustrated in paintings of the 18th century, and no living piebald of this 
type had so far come to our knowledge, although we had in the First Part of our monograph 
given many illustrations of early cases. 
But there is further scientific interest in this piebald because he supports the point of view 
emphasised by me in the monograph referred to, that when a pure race is crossed with a mixed 
race — a hybrid between races with markedly different degrees of pigmentation — then piebalds 
are likely to appear de novo. On this ground it seems to me idle to speak of piebaldism as 
a Mendelian unit character, and it is idle equally to talk of it as a latent unit character, for there 
is no evidence at all that it ever occurred before in the pure races whose crossing leads to. 
these piebalds. In the present case the mother has Mexican and negro blood, the Mexican 
being already a mixture of Spanish and American Indian. She thus combines black, red and 
white races. The father is a coal-black pure African. But several of our piebald pedigrees show 
that it is sufficient for piebaldism when a pure red or white is crossed with a pure dark race 
and then the hybrid be mated again with either pure race, the produce of this second cross may 
be a piebald. The light race may be merely an albino variety of the dark race, and in several 
of our dark race pedigrees we find such piebalds occurring in stocks wherein albinism has 
occurred also. Indeed given an albino occurring in a dark race it seems possible from the 
hybrid between normal and albino by crossing again with normal or albino to produce almost 
every shade of colour as well as every variety of piebaldism. If such cases occur in man and 
axolotl, it seems unnecessary to seek in the ancestry of the albino for possibilities of either 
piebaldism or colour, as for example has been done in the case of mice. There is no reason 
to suppose brilliant colours latent in the normal axolotl, nor piebaldism latent in the normal 
man. At any rate where there is no evidence of it before the crosses take place, it is more 
reasonable to suppose it a product of the crosses themselves. 
Without entering fully into a matter which will shortly be discussed at length elsewhere, 
I would point out that when a hybrid is formed between a black dog which has bred true for 
many generations and an albino of another race, this hybrid is either black or black with white 
markings on chest, never in our experience so far a true piebald, but when this hybrid is crossed 
again with the albino, we obtain at once not only black dogs, or black dogs with white markings, 
but black and white piebalds, lilac and white piebalds, rusty black dogs, red dogs, and albinos ; 
possibly as the work goes on other types will appear also. Much the same changes seem 
to arise from like crosses not only in mice and axolotl but also in man. 
In the case of our present piebald we have the father a pure coal-black negro and his 
brothers and sisters are like him, the mother is a mixture of negro and Spanish-Indian blood ; 
she has a fair skin, black eyes and long black hair, and brothers and sisters are fair skinned like 
her. There are six children ; the three eldest are boys aged 11 years, 9 years, and 7j years 
