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12   NATURAL INHERITANCE.   [CHAP.

illustration partly covers the analogous fact of diseases and other inheritances skipping a generation, which by the way I find to be by no means so usual an occurrence as seems popularly to be imagined.


H eritages that Blend and those that are Mutually Exclusive.-As regards heritages that blend in the offspring, let us take the case of human skin colour. The children of the white and the negro are of a blended tint ; they are neither wholly white nor wholly black, neither are they piebald, but of a fairly uniform mulatto brown. The quadroon child of the mulatto and the white has a quarter tint ; some of the children may be altogether darker or lighter than the rest, but they are not piebald. Skin-colour is therefore a good example of what I call blended inheritance. It need be none the less "Particulate" in its origin, but the result may be regarded as a fine mosaic too minute for its elements to be distinguished in a general view.

Next as regards heritages that come altogether from one progenitor to the exclusion of the rest. Eye-colour is a fairly good illustration of this, the children of a light-eyed and of a dark-eyed parent being much more apt to take their eye-colours after the one or the other than to have intermediate and blended tints.

There are probably no heritages that perfectly blend or that absolutely exclude one another, but all heritages have a tendency in one or the other direction, and the tendency is often a very strong one. This is paralleled