752 
Letters , Extracts , and Notes. [Ibis, 
but, from the position of the Channel Islands, one would 
suppose that resident birds there would conform more 
closely to the birds of the adjoining French coast than to 
those of the far more distant coasts of England. In any 
case, unless the results of comparisons made have already 
been published somewhere, 1 think it can be hardly safe to 
assume that the breeding birds of the Channel Islands are 
all of the British form. • I do not think birds pay much 
respect to political geography. 
Yours truly, 
78 Gibbins Road, II. Gr. Alexander. 
Selby Oak, Birmingham, 
20 July, 1921. 
Subspecies and Evolution. 
Sir, —Without any claim to the “ highly trained scientific 
mind ” postulated for the critic of Colonel Meinertzhagen’s 
paper : “ Some Thoughts on Subspecies and Evolution ” in 
the last number of ‘The Ibis/ one or two points may be raised. 
The first is his use of the term Mutation. It is not 
clear whether it is used in the sense of De Vries, or whether 
it is applied (as some modern writers have applied it) to 
certain characters transmitted in accordance with MendePs 
Law. On p. 533, lines 27 and 28, it seems to refer 
simply to monstrosities or deformities. There is also 
apparent confusion between MendeFs discoveries and the 
Germ-plasm Theory of Weismann, though the latter is only 
mentioned by name once (p. 535), and then in a passage 
which suggests a printer’s error. 
A second point is, that it is not established that when 
domesticated forms return to feral life, they always revert 
indistinguishably to their ancestral type. This has not taken 
place in the case of the Porto Santo Rabbit described by 
Haeckel (‘ History of Creation/ English translation, vol. i.). 
Thus the following (p. 532) is misleading : 
“ The mutationist will argue that whenever a domesti¬ 
cated variety resumes a wild life, the original wild stock 
being dominant to the recessive domesticated variety, such 
