Every one must have heard of cases of albinism, prickly skin, hairy bodies, etc., 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 admitted to be inheritable.  Perhaps the correct way of viewing the whole subject, would be, to look at the inheritance 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 peculiarities 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 important 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 not be otherwise:  thus the inherited peculiarities in the horns of cattle could appear only in the offspring when nearly mature; peculiarities in the silkworm are known to appear at the corresponding caterpillar or cocoon stage.  But hereditary diseases and some other facts make me believe that the rule has a wider extension, and that when there is no apparent reason why a peculiarity should appear at any particular age, yet that it does tend to appear in the offspring at the same period at which it first appeared in the parent.  I believe this rule to be of the highest importance in explaining the laws of embryology.  These remarks are of course confined to the first appearance of the peculiarity, and not to its primary cause, which may have acted on the ovules or male element; in nearly the same manner as in the crossed offspring from a short-horned cow by a long-horned bull, the greater length of horn, though appearing late in life, is clearly due to the male element.

Having alluded to the subject of reversion, I may here refer to a statement often made by naturalists—­namely, that our domestic varieties, when run wild, gradually but certainly revert in character to their aboriginal stocks.  Hence it has been argued that no deductions can be drawn from domestic races to species in a state of nature.  I have in vain endeavoured to discover on what decisive facts the above statement has so often and so boldly been made.  There would be great difficulty in proving its truth:  we may safely conclude that very many of the most strongly-marked domestic varieties could not possibly live in a wild