'The Influence of Heredity and of Environment in Determining the Coat Colors in Mice'. Pp. 87-117, plates VII-IX, reprinted from Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. XXI [21] [Twenty-one].

First separate edition. An ex-library copy, bound in contempory 3/4-leather and cloth, with original wrappers bound in (followed by a number of blank leaves). Perforated stamp to pp. 87/88, other usual library marks. Vertical edge of a few pages near beginning a little jagged. Else Very Good. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1933 was awarded to Thomas H. Morgan 'for his discoveries concerning the role played by the chromosome in heredity.' 'The rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's work in 1900 brought questions of evolution and heredity to the fore in biological circles. Morgan began investigations of Mendelian inheritance in 1905, when he started breeding rats and mice (Kohler 1994). In the summer of 1907, he caught a house mouse in Woods Hole with the 'sport,' or mutation, of a pure white belly. 'Later, I caught two more such mice and, in the same closet, another typical house mouse. In the neighborhood, I have caught a few other white-bellied mice,' Morgan reported (which summons a vision of an agile Morgan chasing mice around Woods Hole). Morgan then obtained white-bellied mice from Iowa and New York and began a series of breeding experiments crossing the wild sport with various domesticated races. 'My intention was to familiarize myself at first hand with the process of Mendelian inheritance,' he wrote, by observing the varieties of coat color that his crosses produced (Morgan 1911b, p. 88) [= paper offered here]' (Diana E. Kenney & Gary G. Borisy, 'Thomas Hunt Morgan at the Marine Biological Laboratory: Naturalist and Experimentalist', Genetics, March 2009; 181(3): 841846).…