that the Chinese dancer is not a natural wild mouse race, but instead the
product of rigid artificial selection. And in connection with this
statement Schlumberger describes a discovery of his own which seems to
have some bearing upon the problem of origin. In an old Japanese wood
carving which came into his possession he found a group of dancing mice.
The artist had represented in minute detail the characteristics of the
members of the group, which consisted of the parents and eight young. The
father and mother as well as four of the little mice are represented as
white spotted with black. Of the four remaining young mice, two are
entirely black and two entirely white. The two pure white individuals have
pink eyes, as has also the mother. The eyes of all the others are black.
From these facts Schlumberger infers that the dancer has resulted from the
crossing of a race of black mice with a race of albinos; the two original
types appear among the offspring in the carving.

Experimental studies of the inheritance of the tendency to dance are of
interest in their bearing upon the question of origin. Such studies have
been made by Haacke (19), von Guaita (17, 18), and Darbishire (13, 14, 15,
16), and the important results of their investigations have been well
summarized by Bateson (5).

By crossing dancing mice with common white mice both Haacke and von Guaita
obtained gray or black mice which are very similar to the wild house mouse
in general appearance and behavior. The characteristic movements of the
dancers do not appear. As the result of a long series of breeding
experiments, Darbishire (16 pp. 26, 27) says: "When the race of waltzing
mice is crossed with albino mice which do not waltz, the waltzing habit
disappears in the resulting young, so that waltzing is completely
recessive in Mendel's sense; the eye-color of the hybrids is always dark;
the coat-color is variable, generally a mixture of wild-gray and white,