308 MEMORIES OF MY LIFE
ment. All the moths in the first generation were photographed neatly on octavo pages by a friend, Miss Reynolds, and a very great deal of trouble was taken about them, but all in vain. The only consolation that I have is that the experiences gained by Mr. Merrifield enabled him to pursue other experiments on moths with great success, which have led to his increased reputation as an entomologist.
Later still it seemed most desirable to obtain data that would throw light on the Average contribution of each Ancestor to the total heritage of the offspring in a mixed population. This is a purely statistical question, the same answer to which would be given on more than one theoretical hypothesis of heredity, whether it be Pangenetic, Mendelian, or other.
I must stop for a moment to pay a tribute to the memory of Mendel, with whom I sentimentally feel myself connected, owing to our having been born in the same year 1822. His careful and long-continued experiments show how much can be performed by those who, like him and Charles Darwin, never or hardly ever leave their homes, and again how much might be done in a fixed laboratory after a uniform tradition of work had been established. Mendel clearly showed that there were such things as alternative atomic characters of equal potency in descent. How far characters generally may be due to simple, or to molecular characters more or less correlated together, has yet to be discovered.
I had thought of experimenting with mice, as cheap to rear and very prolific, and had taken some steps to that end, when I became aware of the large collections of Basset Hounds belonging to the late Sir
