As early as 1902, Correns used as Mendelian pairs, presence of coloring material and absence; also modification into yellow and _no_ modification. In 1905, he extended somewhat this use of present and absent characters, _k_ (keine) preceding the symbol of a character as a negative. Still he did not pretend to generalize the relation of dominance and recessiveness to be that of presence and absence. In 1903 (p. 146) de Vries stated that in very many cases Mendel's law held when one quality is active and the other latent, and that the active quality is dominant. His illustrations show that by activity he meant essentially presence, by latency absence from the visible soma. Bateson's third report (1906) applies presence and absence to several additional cases, and, at the International Genetics Conference of that year, Hurst developed the presence-and-absence hypothesis, favoring the view that the factor for absence is nothing at all, but finding that certain cases, such as Angora coat, offer a difficulty. At the same meeting I suggested that "a variation * * * that is due to abbreviation of the ontogenetic process, which depends on something having dropped out, will be recessive," a progressive variation dominant; and in 1908 I expressed the conclusion that "dominance in heredity appears when a stronger determiner meets a weaker determiner in the germ. The extreme case is that in which a strong determiner meets a determiner so weak as to be practically absent, as when a red flower is crossed with white." I suggested that in some cases of recessiveness of an apparent advanced condition, like Angora hair, the dominant factor is an inhibitor. In the last year or two the presence-and-absence theory has gained wide acceptance, but I still think the cases where there is dominance of the advanced condition over the less advanced--of the quantitatively well-developed over the quantitatively less well-developed--have not been sufficiently considered. In human hair-color any other hypothesis demands that there are many units in the higher grades of pigmentation and fewer in the lower grades and that the presence of the surplus factor in any other higher grade dominates over its absence in the next lower grade; but there is no evidence in human hair-color of distinct, discontinuous units in the common yellow-brown series. And, in ontogeny, the different grades of color form a _continuous_ series whose development proceeds throughout early life and may even be stimulated to an advanced stage of darkening by disease. The _cessation_ of color development may take place at any point, and this seems incompatible with the theory of unit-characters for the different grades of human hair-color. In the present paper, on the other hand, the characters dealt with are mostly unit-characters and their quantitative variations mostly heterozygotic. Even the case of the Silkie boot (table 31, C) referred to in an earlier paper[14] as illustrating recessiveness