Abstract
ALL students of modern advances in our knowledge of heredity are familiar with Prof. W. E. Castle's experiments in modifying the hooded pattern of piebald rats by continued selection. In a recent Publication of the Carnegie Institution, No. 288, “Studies of Heredity in Rabbits, Rats, and Mice,” Prof. Castle describes the results of crossing his selected races with unmodified wild rats, in continuation of his previous work, and announces the conclusion to which he has come. “The same wild race, when its residual heredity is made fully effective by repeated crosses, brings both the plus-selected and the minus-selected hooded lines to a phenptype of common grade. This shows, contrary to my earlier opinion, that what has really happened in the case of the selected races was more largely due to residual heredity than to any change in the gene for the hooded character itself.” In this paper further experiments on the breeding of English and Dutch white-spotted rabbits are also described, the results of which are generally comparable with those obtained from the hooded rats.
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C., G. Studies in Animal Inheritance. Nature 106, 297 (1920). https://doi.org/10.1038/106297a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/106297a0