are to be brought under the law of interrupted or latent transmission, although the number of intervening generations may be enormous. When cultivated plants or domestic animals become wild, when they are withdrawn from the conditions of cultivated life, they experience changes which appear not only as adaptations to their new mode of life, but partially also as relapses into the ancient original form out of which the cultivated forms have been developed. Thus the different kinds of cabbage, which are exceedingly different in form, may be led back to the original form, by allowing them to grow wild. In like manner, dogs, horses, heifers, etc., when growing wild, often revert more or less to a long extinct generation. An immensely long succession of generations may pass away before this power of latent transmission becomes extinguished. A third law of conservative transmission may be called the _law of sexual transmission_, according to which each sex transmits to the descendants of the same sex peculiarities which are not inherited by the descendants of the other sex. The so-called secondary sexual characters, which in many respects are of extraordinary interest, everywhere furnish numerous examples of this law. Subordinate or secondary sexual characters are those peculiarities of one of the two sexes which are not directly connected with the sexual organs themselves; such characters, which exclusively belong to the male sex, are, for example, the antlers of the stag, the mane of the lion, and the spur of the cock. The human beard, an ornament commonly denied to the female sex, belongs to the same class. Similar characteristics by which the female sex is alone distinguished are, for example, the developed breasts, with the lactatory glands of female mammals and the pouch of the female opossum. The bodily size, also, and complexion, differs in female animals of many species from that of the male. All these secondary sexual qualities, like the sexual organs themselves, are transmitted by the male organism only to the male, not to the female, and _vice versâ_. Contrary facts are rare exceptions to the rule. A fourth law of transmission, which has here to be mentioned, in a certain sense contradicts the last, and limits it, viz., the _law of mixed or mutual_ (amphigonous) _transmission_. This law tells us that every organic individual produced in a sexual way receives qualities from both parents, from the father as well as from the mother. This fact, that personal qualities of each of the two sexes are transmitted to both male and female descendants, is very important, Goethe mentions it of himself, in the beautiful lines— “Von Vater hab ich die Statur, des Lebens ernstes Führen Von Mütterchen die Frohnatur und Lust zu fabuliren.” “From my father I have my stature and the serious tenour of my life, From my mother a joyous nature and a turn for poetizing.”