As Professor Weldon himself tells us[159], conclusions from pedigree must be based on the conditions of the several ancestors; and even more categorically (p. 244), “_The degree to which a parental character affects offspring depends not only upon its development in the individual parent, but on its degree of development in the ancestors of that parent._” [My italics.] Having rehearsed this profession of an older faith Professor Weldon proceeds to stultify it in his very next paragraph. For there he once again reminds us that _Telephone_, the mongrel pea of recent origin, which does not breed true to seed characters, has yet manifested the peculiar power of stamping the recessive characters on its cross-bred offspring, though pure and stable varieties that have exhibited the same characters in a high degree for generations have _not_ that power. As we now know, the presence or absence of a character in a progenitor _may_ be no indication whatever as to the probable presence of the character in the offspring; for the characters of the latter depend on gametic and not on zygotic differentiation. [159] See above, p. 186. The problem is of a different order of complexity from that which Professor Weldon suggests, and facts like these justify the affirmation that if we could at this moment bring together the whole series of individuals forming the pedigree of _Telephone_, or of any other plant or animal known to be aberrant as regards heredity, we should have no more knowledge of the nature of these aberrations; no more prescience of the moment at which they would begin, or of their probable modes of manifestation; no more criterion in fact as to the behaviour such an individual would exhibit in crossing[160], or solid ground from which to forecast its posterity, than we have already. We should learn then--what we know already--that at some particular point of time its peculiar constitution was created, and that its peculiar properties then manifested themselves: how or why this came about, we should no more comprehend with the full ancestral series before us, than we can in ignorance of the ancestry. Some cross-breds follow Mendelian segregation; others do not. In some, palpable dominance appears; in others it is absent. [160] Beyond an indication as to the homogeneity or “purity” of its gametes at a given time.