influencing the character of the offspring is a very old one, a well-known instance being the sharp practice of Jacob’s using peeled wands to influence the color of his cattle.  In regard to coincidences the great number of cases in which strong impressions made on the mind of the pregnant mother without result on the offspring are forgotten.  The belief has been productive of great anxiety and even unhappiness during a period which is necessarily a trying one, and should be dismissed as being both theoretically impossible and unsupported by fact.

The malformations are divided anatomically into those characterized, first, by excess formation, second, by deficient formation, third, by abnormal displacement of parts.  They are due to intrinsic causes which are in the germ, and which may be due to some unusual conditions in either the male or female germ cell or an imperfect commingling of the germinal material, and to extrinsic causes which physically, as in the nature of a shock or chemically as by the action of a poison, may affect the embryo through the mother.  Malformations are made more numerous in chickens by shaking the eggs before brooding.  A number of malformations are produced by accidental conditions arising in the environment; for instance, the vascular cord connecting mother and child may become wound around parts constricting them or even cutting them off, and the membrane around the child may become adherent to certain parts and prevent the development of these.  The extrinsic causes are more operative the more unfavorable is the environment of the mother.  Malformations are more common in illegitimate children than in legitimate and more common in alcoholic mothers; there is an unfavorable environment of poverty in both cases, added to in the latter and usually in the former by the injurious action of the alcohol.

The more extensive malformations have no effect on heredity, because the subjects of them are incapable of procreation.  The malformations which arise from the accidents of pregnancy and which are compatible with a perfectly normal germ are in the nature of acquired characteristics and are not inherited.  Those malformations, however, which are due to qualities in the germinal material itself are inherited, and certain of them with remarkable persistence.  There are instances in which the slight malformation consisting in an excess of fingers or toes has persisted through many generations.  It may occasionally lapse in a generation to reappear later.  In certain cases, notably in the bleeders, the inheritance is transmitted by the female alone, in other cases by the sexes equally, but there are no cases of transmission by the male line only.  It is evident that when the same malformation affects both the male and the female line the hereditary influence is much stronger.  A case has been related to me in which most of the inhabitants in a remote mountain valley in Virginia where there has been much intermarriage