The Descent of Man

owing to the danger which she would thus
have incurred during incubation.
This view necessitates a tedious discussion on a
difficult point, namely, whether the transmission
of a character, which is at first inherited by
both sexes can be subsequently limited in its
transmission to one sex alone by means of natural
selection. We must bear in mind, as shewn
in the preliminary chapter on sexual selection,
that characters which are limited in their development
to one sex are always latent in the other.
An imaginary illustration will best aid us
in seeing the difficulty of the case; we may
suppose that a fancier wished to make a breed
of pigeons, in which the males alone should be
coloured of a pale blue, whilst the females retained
their former slaty tint. As with pigeons
characters of all kinds are usually transmitted
to both sexes equally, the fancier would have to
try to convert this latter form of inheritance into
sexually-limited transmission. All that he could