in length, saddle-feathers on the loins, and hackles on the neck,--ornaments
which, as Mr. Hewitt remarks, "would be held as abominable in this breed." The
Sebright bantam is known (13/65. 'The Poultry Book' by Mr. Tegetmeier 1866
page 241.) to have originated about the year 1800 from a cross between a
common bantam and a Polish fowl, recrossed by a hen-tailed bantam, and
carefully selected; hence there can hardly be a doubt that the sickle-feathers
and hackles which appeared in the old hen were derived from the Polish fowl or
common bantam; and we thus see that not only certain masculine characters
proper to the Sebright bantam, but other masculine characters derived from the
first progenitors of the breed, removed by a period of above sixty years, were
lying latent in this henbird, ready to be evolved as soon as her ovaria became
diseased.

From these several facts it must be admitted that certain characters,
capacities, and instincts, may lie latent in an individual, and even in a
succession of individuals, without our being able to detect the least sign of
their presence. When fowls, pigeons, or cattle of different colours are
crossed, and their offspring change colour as they grow old, or when the
crossed turbit acquired the characteristic frill after its third moult, or
when rarely-bred bantams partially assume the red plumage of their prototype,
we cannot doubt that these qualities were from the first present, though
latent, in the individual animal, like the characters of a moth in the
caterpillar. Now, if these animals had produced offspring before they had
acquired with advancing age their new characters, nothing is more probable
than that they would have transmitted them to some of their offspring, who in
this case would in appearance have received such characters from their grand-
parents or more distant progenitors. We should then have had a case of
reversion, that is, of the reappearance in the child of an ancestral
character, actually present, though during youth completely latent, in the
parent; and this we may safely conclude is what occurs in all reversions to