Such a suppression of a character is not really a loss. An organism belonging to an elementary species in which, say, monochromatic flowers are usually produced may produce flowers which are striped. The progeny of the plant may still produce monochromatic flowers, but we must think of it as also possessing the potentiality of producing striped flowers. In the terminology of Mendelism the characters are dominant and recessive ones. In discussing Mendelian varieties we consider the manner in which two contrasting characters--one present in the male parent and one in the female--are transmitted to the offspring. The characters in question may be the tallness of the male parent and the contrasting shortness of the female; or the brown eyes of the male and the blue eyes of the female; or the brown skin of the female parent and the white skin of the male one. These characters may be inherited in two ways: either they may be blended or they may remain distinct in the offspring. The children of the brown mother and the white father are usually coloured in some tint intermediate between those of the parents. The mulatto hybrid is fertile with either of the parent races, and again the offspring may take a tint intermediate between those of the parents, and so on through a number of generations. But somewhere in this series the concealed or recessive brown colour may appear in all its completeness, showing that it has been present in the organisations of all the intervening generations. The progeny of a tall male parent and a short female parent are not, in general, intermediate in stature between the parents; some of them may be tall and others short. The children of a brown-eyed mother and a blue-eyed father do not usually have eyes in which the colours of the parental eyes are blended: they are blue-eyed or brown-eyed. The contrasting characters are spoken of as dominant and recessive: if tallness is transmitted to offspring, which may nevertheless produce dwarf offspring, the latter character is said to be recessive to tallness. The contrasting characters of the parents therefore remain distinct in the progeny, some of the latter exhibiting the one character and some the other; while it may happen that the one character or the other may be segregated, so that it only appears in, and is transmitted by, the offspring. There are numerical relationships between the numbers of the offspring in which the contrasting characters appear.