Dear Sir

I may promise that I pounce upon every scrap emanating from your pen, that I can get a hold of, with the greatest avidity, unfortunately however, from my isolated position less of such nutritive pabulum falls to my share than I could wish, but for all that I am grateful for even the small measure thereof that is meted to me, therefore I scarcely care to complain.

My reason for inflicting this screed upon you is, because I saw an extract from a paper of yours in Nature the other day, on the subject of Inheritance, which does not agree with my experience and observation, as I shall endeavour to make plain to you.¹ Of course I do not for a moment mean to put my crude observations against your well considered and mature dicta, but merely present them on the chance of your noting some point which from lack of opportunity you have hitherto failed to grasp.

The first point that I shall do my self the pleasure to draw your attention to, concerns sheep. When I was a boy of fourteen my father² sent me to a sheep station of his, to assist a brother of mine³ in the management thereof. This station was in a mountainous part of the country and the ground all over the run was well littered with logs, charred black by bush fires.

Having had the quaint preachings of the Patriach Jacob well ingrained, by constant bible readings, I of course thought that the progeny of the flocks must truly be parti colored to a considerable extent, by reason of the black logs, judge then of my surprise, when at lambing time, not a single lamb came, either black or spotted. During all the years my father owned that station, he never had a black sheep. So Jacobs dodge in the matter of the peeled wands did not hold good on my fathers Dean Station.⁴

This fact gave me much food for thought in as much as I could not understand, why the black logs did not effect the progeny during the moment of their conception, as Jacobs rods did the progeny of Labans sheep. The next matter which I shall bring under your notice bears entirely on the question of inheritance, it is as follows.

My late father and my self have for the period of forty consecutive years, branded our herds on the same part of each beast, and cut the same shaped piece out of the same side ear, and still, we have never had a calf calved, either branded or earmarked

The next matter with which I shall trouble you came under my observation, whilst prosecuting Ethnological researches.

When I first went to the Lower Murray river, in 1845 I saw an aboriginal woman with one leg completely withered from the foot to the hip joint, she was born with this malformation, when I first saw her, she would be about eighteen years of age, I knew that woman for thirty years, and during that time, she had sons and daughters, and grandchildren also and every one of these came into the world perfect in every limb.

Thus in two instances as you will perceive that have come prominently under my observation heredity has failed to obtain in the very smallest degree. The interest I take in physiology is the apology I make for this intrusion

I am | Dear Sir | Yours faithfully | Peter Beveridge