LAWS OF HEREDITY.

Ohinemuri Gazette, Volume XXI, Issue 2722, 23 November 1910, Page 3

LAWS OF HEREDITY.

An interesting scientific project for testing in the Pacific the reliability of Mendel's laws of heredity, is under the consideration of scientific bodies in Great Britain in connection with the visit to Melbourne and bydney of the British Association in 1914. The proposal is, in effect, to conduct, with the aid of Australian scientists, an examination into the life history ot the Norfolk Islanders, with the object of demonstrating whether Mendel's principal law be true. The law, to quote Mr R. B. Townshend, who has written to the British press on the subject, is :—" That when two races are crossed the first generation of hybrids comes out more or less as a mixture of both parents, but that subsequently, when the hybrids are bred together, half of the second generation appears to be mixed like the first, while a quarter oi it takes after one grandparent and a quarter alter the other, and these proportions are repeated in subsequent generations." Hitherto experiments and observations have had to be confined to the vegetable kingdom and certain animals, notably mice, and the results have been most interesting. The difficulty of testing the law as regards man has been that hitherto no mixed race has been thought of which has been segregated 'for a time sufficiently long to provide data. At last however, scientists are turning to the descendants of the mutineers ot the Bounty, now residing in Norfolk Island, and shortly to become citizens of the Commonwealth, as likely to give them the key to the mystery. The romantic story of the blending oi the mutineers with the Tahitians and their migrations from Tahiti to Pitcairn Island, and later to Norfolk Island is a matter of history. Ot their descendants the majority are now Norfolk Islanders, though some still live on Pitcairn_ Their pedigrees have been preserved 111 a large number of instances. Mr Townshend writes : —" There has been no fresh admixture of Polynesian blood, and only a very few white men have been permitted to marry into the community. ' We have their full pedigrees, which have been carefully kept from the very beginning. The British naval officers who saw'the first generation spoke of them with enthusiasm. These sons and daughters of British seamen and Tahitian women inherited from both sides a magnificent physique. Some of the young men were made like Hercules. The women were not less vigorous ; they were fairei than the men, but, with only one exception, all had dark eyes and halt'and an olive brown complexion. In the next generation they began to vary; some are said to have been as fair as Europeans, some as dark as full-blooded Tahitians. These variations are reported to have increased with later generations, and to appear at the present day in children of the same lamily born of the same parents."