coloured birds, are at first of one
colour, but in a year or two acquire feathers of the colour of the other
parent; for in this case the tendency to a change of plumage is clearly
latent in the young bird. So it is with hornless breeds of cattle, some of
which acquire, as they grow old, small horns. Purely bred black and white
bantams, and some other fowls, occasionally assume, with advancing years,
the red feathers of the parent-species. I will here add a somewhat
different case, as it connects in a striking manner latent characters of
two classes. Mr. Hewitt[126] possessed an excellent Sebright gold-laced hen
bantam, which, as she became old, grew diseased in her ovaria, and assumed
male characters. In this breed the males resemble the females in all
respects except in their combs, wattles, spurs, and instincts; hence it
might have been expected that the diseased hen would have assumed only
those masculine characters which are proper to the breed, but she acquired,
in addition, well-arched tail sickle-feathers quite a foot in length,
saddle-feathers on the loins, and hackles on the neck,--ornaments which, as
Mr. Hewitt remarks, "would be held as abominable in this breed." The
Sebright bantam is known[127] to have originated about the year 1800 from a
cross between a common bantam and a Polish fowl, recrossed by a hen-tailed
bantam, and carefully selected; hence there can hardly be a doubt that the
sickle-feathers and hackles which appeared in the old hen were derived from
the Polish fowl or common bantam; and we thus see that not only certain
masculine characters proper to the Sebright bantam, but other masculine
characters derived from the first progenitors of the breed, removed by a
period of above sixty years, were lying latent in this hen-bird, ready to
be evolved as soon as her ovaria became diseased.

From these several facts it must be admitted that certain characters,
capacities, and instincts may lie latent in an individual, and even in a
succession of individuals, without our being able to detect the least signs
of their presence. We have {55} already seen that the transmission of a
character from the grandparent to the grandchild, with its apparent
omission in the intermediate parent of the opposite sex, becomes simple on
this view. When fowls, pigeons, or cattle of different colours are crossed,
and their offspring change colour as they grow old, or when the crossed
turbit acquired the characteristic frill