progenitors, however remote.

This view of the latency in each generation of all the characters which appear
through reversion, is also supported by their actual presence in some cases
during early youth alone, or by their more frequent appearance and greater
distinctness at this age than during maturity. We have seen that this is often
the case with the stripes on the legs and faces of the several species of the
horse genus. The Himalayan rabbit, when crossed, sometimes produces offspring
which revert to the parent silver-grey breed, and we have seen that in purely
bred animals pale-grey fur occasionally reappears during early youth. Black
cats, we may feel assured, would occasionally produce by reversion tabbies;
and on young black kittens, with a pedigree (13/66. Carl Vogt 'Lectures on
Man' English translation 1864 page 411.) known to have been long pure, faint
traces of stripes may almost always be seen which afterwards disappear.
Hornless Suffolk cattle occasionally produce by reversion horned animals; and
Youatt (13/67. 'On Cattle' page 174.) asserts that even in hornless
individuals "the rudiment of a horn may be often felt at an early age."

No doubt it appears at first sight in the highest degree improbable that in
every horse of every generation there should be a latent capacity and tendency
to produce stripes, though these may not appear once in a thousand
generations; that in every white, black, or other coloured pigeon, which may
have transmitted its proper colour during centuries, there should be a latent
capacity in the plumage to become blue and to be marked with certain
characteristic bars; that in every child in a six-fingered family there should
be the capacity for the production of an additional digit; and so in other
cases. Nevertheless, there is no more inherent improbability in this being the
case than in a useless and rudimentary organ, or even in only a tendency to
the production of a rudimentary organ, being inherited during millions of
generations, as is well known to occur with a multitude of organic beings.