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Page 368.
What can be more wonderful than that characters, which have disappeared during scores, or hundreds, or even thousands of generations, should suddenly reappear perfectly developed, as in the case of pigeons and fowls, both when purely bred and especially when crossed; or as with the zebrine stripes on dun-colored horses, and other such cases? Many monstrosities come under this same head, as when rudimentary organs are redeveloped, or when an organ which we must believe was possessed by an early progenitor of the species, but of which not even a rudiment is left, suddenly reappears, as with the fifth stamen in some Scrophulariaceæ.
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Page 369.
In every living creature we may feel assured that a host of long-lost characters lie ready to be evolved under proper conditions. How can we make intelligible, and connect with other facts, this wonderful and common capacity of reversion—this power of calling back to life long-lost characters?
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Page 336.
Imperfect nails sometimes appear on the stumps of the amputated fingers of man; and it is an interesting fact that with the snake-like saurians, which present a series with more and more imperfect limbs, the terminations of the phalanges first disappear, “the nails becoming transferred to their proximal remnants, or even to parts which are not phalanges.”
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