the third, and almost purely in the second and last: so that it would
seem, at first, as if the normal type were more powerful than the
variety. But all these children grew up and intermarried with normal
wives and husband, and then, note what took place: Salvator had four
children, three of whom exhibited the hexadactyle members of their
grandfather and father, while the youngest had the pentadactyle limbs
of the mother and grandmother; so that here, notwithstanding a double
pentadactyle dilution of the blood, the hexadactyle variety had the
best of it. The same pre-potency of the variety was still more
markedly exemplified in the progeny of two of the other children, Marie
and George. Marie (whose thumbs only were deformed) gave birth to a boy
with six toes, and three other normally formed children; but George,
who was not quite so pure a pentadactyle, begot, first, two girls, each
of whom had six fingers and toes; then a girl with six fingers on each
hand and six toes on the right foot, but only five toes on the left;
and lastly, a boy with only five fingers and toes. In these instances,
therefore, the variety, as it were, leaped over one generation to
reproduce itself in full force in the next. Finally, the purely
pentadactyle Andre was the father of many children, not one of whom
departed from the normal parental type.

If a variation which approaches the nature of a monstrosity can strive
thus forcibly to reproduce itself, it is not wonderful that less
aberrant modifications should tend to be preserved even more strongly;
and the history of the Ancon sheep is, in this respect, particularly
instructive. With the "'cuteness" characteristic of their nation, the
neighbours of the Massachusetts farmer imagined it would be an
excellent thing if all his sheep were imbued with the stay-at-home
tendencies enforced by Nature upon the newly-arrived ram; and they
advised Wright to kill the old patriarch of his fold, and install the