aking of Laced Sebright Bantams, says[58] that, "why this should
be so, I know not, but I am confident that those that are best laced
frequently produce offspring very far from perfect in their markings,
whilst those exhibited by myself, which have so often proved successful,
were bred from the union of heavily-laced birds with those that were
scarcely sufficiently laced."

It is a singular fact that, although several deaf-mutes often occur in the
same family, and though their cousins and other relations are often in the
same condition, yet their parents are very rarely deaf-mutes. To give a
single instance: not one scholar out of 148, who were at the same time in
the London Institution, was the child of parents similarly afflicted. So
again, when a male or a female deaf-mute marries a sound person, their
children are most rarely affected: in Ireland out of 203 children thus
produced one alone was mute. Even when both parents have been deaf-mutes,
as in the case of forty-one marriages in the United States and of six in
Ireland, only two deaf and dumb children were produced. Mr. Sedgwick,[59]
in commenting on this remarkable and fortunate failure in the power of
transmission in the direct line, remarks that it may possibly be owing to
"excess having reversed the action of some natural law in development." But
it is safer in the present state of our knowledge to look at the whole case
as simply unintelligible.

* * * * *

With respect to the inheritance of structures mutilated by injuries or
altered by disease it is difficult to come to any {23} definite conclusion.
In some cases mutilations have been practised for a vast number of
generations without any inherited result. Godron has remarked[60] that
different races of man have from time immemorial knocked out their upper
incisors, cut off joints of their fingers, made holes of immense size
through the lobes of their ears or through their nostrils, made deep gashes
in various parts of their bodies, and there is no reason whatever to
suppose that these mutilations have ever been inherited. Adhesions due to
inflammation and pits from the small-pox (and formerly many consecutive
generations must have been thus pitted) are not inherited. With respect to
Jews, I have been assured by three medical men of the Jewish faith that
circumcision, which has been practised for so many ages, has produced no
inherited effect; Blumenbach, on the other hand,