‘My dear Pearson - Yours of 14^th.

Ordinary, normal, pigmented hairs contain both granular & diffuse pigment? Your position is, if I am right, that the essence of albinism is absence of the granular form; that however much macroscopic, fixed, colour a hair (or skin) may show, the bearer is essentially an albino if the pigment is of the diffuse kind; and that, as a logical conclusion total absence of all pigment – diffuse as well as granular – does not make the individual a less [sic] perfect albino than another whose hair (or) skin are diffuse-pigmented.

I suppose there would be some sort of rider to the effect that, as at present advised, diffuse pigmentation could not reach more than a certain (perhaps yet undetermined) intensity, so that a really black albino (from diffuse black pigment) shd. not be expected, i.e. that great depth of shade, or any shade of certain tints, means granules.

The spectacle mark we have (a) dirt, (b) effect of tears & mucus in gumming the hairs together & so making them look darker than when dry & separate from each other, (c) pigment within the hairs, presumably granular & diffuse in most coloured Pekes (face & espec. spectacle region is usually the darkest part of the coat of Pekes that are not black), & presumably (or proved by Scott[?] or you) diffuse only inthe albinos.

Obviously (a) & (b) will vary with external conditions in same dog. And it seems clear that (c) varies too according to either exposure to sun & wind (but this is difficult to separate from (a) & (b) wh. vary with the same conditions), or physiological states e.g. sexual influences in ♀. The “control” wd. be to keep both ♀ & ♂ in dark clean confinement for long period, - very difficult to carry out for any of us.

I gather that you cannot remove all the colour from spectacle mark hairs, by alcohol process. Is the same true for the “fawn” &c coloured hairs of body of albinos, or has material been too small to test this?

The skin I mention with spectacle mark resistance to washing is pom Fi. ob. About 6 months old; the mark is small but characteristic, I am not sure whether you had some of the hairs; anyway you can have the skin to do what you like with it if you say the word. It is “cured” & that may affect the solubility &c. of the pigment? It has not be[en] done with alcohol, unless alcohol comes into the “curing” process (unlikely). I have the instructions how to, from you, but never got to doing it.

My point is that so far as is known the spectacle-mark hairs contain some pigment which is neither external nor the result of dyeing or staining but is intrinsic, a product of hair growth, % that this probably differs only in degree (say concentration) from whatever pigment may be present in other parts of [the] same individual; & that because that is a (I won’t say the) common seat of most intense pigmentation (granular & diffuse I presume) in ordinary Pekinese.

If when you have seen my sections of skin of young puppy cases[?] you confirm what I take to be diffuse pigmentation of some of the hairs the above position would seem to be demonstrated.

For the moment the question how much the “mark” pigment is what may be called potentially congenital, how much post-natally physiological i.e. valuable, & how much adventitious either as dye from tears & mucus, if such can produce dye, or as dirt, must remain to a certain extent open.'

‘...

Tong is supposed to be just coming on in heat if things go well & she is properly served within the next week or so I will let you know. We shd. be relieved to be rid of her, but on the other hand can I daresay manage. But if she is served & quiet I expect you won’t mind taking her before you leave?

...

Yours Sincerely,

E. Nettleship

I was told by 2 people of the Albino show at the R. Soc. – It was named, but not detailed, in The Times. [nb: lecture by K.P. on ‘Albinism in Man’ noted in The Times 23rd Jan 1909, p. 4 and 19th Jan 1909, p. 4 – see M.S. lectures]’

[enclosed with above: instrcutions (M.S. & typescript) for feeding of Tong, puppies (on 'Lactol')]

‘I should think Tong’s coat shedding may be only the normal spring occurrence; Jack is “coming off” a good deal too & did so last spring also.

But Tong should come in season again before very long of course & it will be well to be prepared.

I am, on reflection, not certain that Mrs Dew-Smith can get at a black Pug; she at first said she could but I rather think that the possibility fell through on enquiry & had to be substituted by a coloured Pekingese with as nearly as possible an independent pedigree, her sister-in-law possessing such a dog. – But I am now writing to Mrs D.S. to find out for certain.

I am also writing to Doyne (Ophth. Surg.) who used to keep pups & may possibly know something.

Usher’s Edinburgh one seems all right.

I am going to make a suggestion though I don’t suppose it will commend itself to you? Could you not make your section or chapter on the Pigment problems into an independent paper to come out as soon after the albino memoir as possible, indicating just such an outline or suggestion of what it wd. be like as to make it join on naturally when it did appear. – You wd. then get out the whole of the clinical, historical & geographical parts as originally planned & leave the Chemico-Physiological, - which after all had been grafted on since the inception – to its quite legitimate & natural separate growth.

Anyhow it will (the pigment section) be done entirely by you, or at any rate I can take no share whatever because I know nothing about the subject; & if this pigment section is to be included in the memoir your sole authorship must be made perfectly clear.

Please think of it & work it on the separate lines suggested if you possibly can.

...’

‘My Dear Pearson,

First – yours of 30 August – As to Usher’s material, I have written hum that I will look it through but that as I know much less about animals’ & birds’ eyes than he does I shall probably not venture to alter anything that he has written;- he is over-modest & I think v. tired for want of holiday.

A bitch (or a dog) to take Tong’s place – I can only suggest at the moment her daughter Marie-ban (No. 82 on draft ped. herewith) who is with Usher; I don’t know whether he wd. let her come back, but his space is not large & he has his hares[?], & might be glad. Ask him when he returns from his holiday.

The difficulty we find is that people get so terribly fond of these dogs when once they have them; “we are quite silly about” him or her is what several have written.

Mr. Clack would have sent Wee Tong but wrote just too late when own affairs were getting upset with move so had to put her off, & you will know how to deal with him about her now.

Data you want re: Pekingese hair – I return your letter in case you may want to see your questions & am putting what replies I can on separate sheet with it, also a photog. of Little Oo (question 4) which shows him but not his pedigree! – To be returned please (the photog. I mean)

... [re: construction of pedigree, help of Miss ‘Robinson is it?’] ... The difficulty of construction of a suitable diagram hinges on the polygamy & incest that is so frequent. It seems hopeless to keep to any horizontal stratification [note: ‘The only easy way I can see is to put a thick root from the polygamous ♂ & subdivide it?, but that may easily become clumsy.’] as in our ordinary pedigrees.

One reason against attempting anything final is that you wd. probably disagree with some of my connecting lines &c. & it is better you shd. do the standardizing as you have by now had much more experience than I have.

I will now go on, as I can, with the remaining refractions &c.; I have my original tables here as pattern.

This seems all for this time I think.

Yours sincerely,

E. Nettleship

...’

‘My dear Pearson,

Tong’s certificate says she was born Aug. 24. 09 [sic] so she is now past 5 & getting on in life for a dog of small & fancy breed.

I remember last autumn when we first had her, & on quite into the winter, shelost a good deal of hair but as she was (1) pregnant in Dec-Jan. & (2) sickly all Feb. into Mch. we did not think much of it; & she never shed so much as to look unkempt.

Does she have oatmeal in any form? It is said to make dogs’ skins irritable. We had a lot of bother in that way some years ago from giving a little dog porridge (he was a common little rough coated sort of mongrel): he got all right when the oatmeal was stopped.

May I come Saturday morning 13^th...?...

I am tempted to bring our puppy (Wang, 29^th July) for comparison with yours if he is not too heavy & weather is not too bad &c.: I shall see.

Tong herself was one of a litter of 5 all “albinos”, both the parents being “albinos”. She (Tong) had had “several” litters of pups. by red dogs before she came here & “all the puppies were red.” Here & with you she had (1) 5 by Jack (albino) all as white as she is i.e. rather whiter than Jack: (2) 3 by Jack 1 Aug. last your lot, less albinotic than the former. Can this mean that Jack (the more coloured of the two) & much the younger, is getting prepotent over Tong? Note that though Tong’s parents were albinotic, Jack & Jill were of a litter of 5 in which the other 3 were coloured; both parents being coloured &  indeed the ascendants for several generations. Jack & Jill & Tong meet in a celebrated coloured sire (Goodwood Lo) 3-4 years up, but one cannot tell whether the albsm. comes from him or from some of the various, apparently unrelated dams that have intervened, - none of which however were albinotic.

Yrs, E. Nettleship.

Jack & Jill have a more pronounced dark spectacle mark than Tong & the coat whitish cream, not true white. If the pigment of Jack’s spectacle mark were diffused over the whole coat of his puppies would it explain the light fawn or your’s [sic] & of my Wang?’

[re: inc. of depiction of pup of Jakc & Jill in draft]

‘About the hairs in the skin of the above puppy & in the nose-skin of (I think) two other similar specimens of alter date that I have at home, the proper thing of course will be for these hair-skin sections to be submitted to Dr Scott & you & reported on by [you], I being allowed to insert of quote from the Report in my description of the individual in the descriptive list of the pedigree. I of course know nothing about pigment & hair except wh. has come to me from or thro. you; & I don’t thing Coats pretends to any exhaustive knowledge of it. The 2 sorts, “granular” & “diffuse” I know about of course, & that the latter is to a great extent, at present, the pigment of “coloured albinism”.

In my ignorance I thought both kinds were intra-cellular; I thought of the “granular” as what, if the hair were a test-tube of fluid, would be a ppt., of the diffuse as a coloured solution.

Now you speak of inter-cellular pigment & granular pigment & I infer from the way you write that “inter-cellular” & “granular” are, for this purpose the same, i.e. that the granular (wh. for convenience I call the ppt[ed?] pigment, above) pigment is between the cells, not within them, & thus “diffuse” within them.

Scott – underlined red [i.e. in draft] – p.p. 4, 5, 8, 13, confirms the above; indeed yours is I suppose based on him largely?

You speak of occasional difficulty in deciding whether intercellular pigment is due to granules or not, & Scott (p. 4) speaks of air-bubbles wh. make the hair containing them macroscopically light (air-bubbles were I fancy a while back assigned a large share in the [graying/whitening] of senile hair!).

In a recent letter probably written just before I left home, I think I told you of (a) diffuse yellowish staining & (b)? granules or ?air-bubbles, in nose-skin of some of the puppies & that Scott or you ought to see them – add, now, to those spleens, this further one of Coats’s (really another one of the same series, & from me) & we (= you) will get the things straight in plenty of time to go into my new section. I shd. like to examine, for my own instruction my sections & to examine the additional one of Coats when I get home before sending them to you, so as to get all the good I can from them whatever revision you (& Scott?) find necessary to make.

Yrs very sincerely,

E. Nettleship.

...’

‘My dear Pearson,

I believe spaniel is the right word; Mrs Douglas Murray, who has helped me a good deal about them, uses the word in one of her letters: “the origin of these spaniels” &c.

The point about higher & less high mammals had not occurred to me, though one had thought there might easily be differences between man & most of the others, both as to albinism & other things. Then[?] I thought that albino ferrets (which by the way are “higher”) & rabbits were a sort of permanent breed & bred true, but perhaps I am wrong & they are all what is called hap-hazard, i.e. undesignedly extracted. One wd. think this would be known for ferrets anyhow.

I have just been told of a peculiar breed of siamese cats, - probably you know of them-; “chocolate” fur with “white” or “pink” or “green” eyes (muddle between iris & pupil, & between pupil of albino seen 1st opposite the tapetum then opposite ordinary red choroid); said also to have a peculiar kink in the tail, from birth? Somebody at Shotover (Oxford) said to have them.

All you suggest about propagation & record of dogs is very attractive, but I am not sure the job would not be too big for me. Anyhow we have not got the pups yet.

I am enquiring as to the stud book; there is certainly some record & some sort of official registration, whatever that means.

I am all safe[?] as to the mice experiments.

You shall see the Pekingese pedigree soon; there may be a few more cases to come in yet.

...’

‘... [re: proofs (of Albinism in Man)]

“This was done... which will be discussed in out chapter on albino animals.”

I was under the impression that the account of the Pekingese was to form a small separate paper, after this big memoir had come out?

I know I wrote to you some time ago that I would put together what I had, & that if I could not do that I wd. hand over the crude stuff to you & say no more, or to that effect. But a separate paper was in my mind the whole time.

Anyhow, I have done nothing towards putting material together, & will not promise to do it against time.

I should like to write the paper, or the bulk of it, perhaps this summer-autumn. But if you are insistent on running the Pekingese into the present memoir I must give it up & will send you my material in the rough as soon as possible.

The pedigree of course is practically ready.

E.N.’

‘... [re: proofs (of Albinism in Man)]

You may fill in these 2 blanks as to Patty’s age nearly correctly if you don’t want to wait.

The 1^st sample of hair was taken when she was either 21 or 28 days old (I remember this from remembering her birthday = 18 August 1910, & remembering that I took the sample soon after I returned from Germany in the 1^st half of September & belive that I took it at an even weekly date).

The 2^nd sample was taken not very long before your last visit to Sir F. Galton of which you no doubt have the date (? about 20 January last) – I should think it was taken either end of November or 1^st half of December, & that you might say “between 3 & 4 months old”.

The colour was still present, though less marked, when you called at your Galton visit. Since then it has, macroscopically, faded all over her, so that for quite a month past she has been decidedly whiter than her parents Jack & Jill; as white, say, as your Tong was.

E.N.’

...

[enclosed in above:]

D. Heron to K. Pearson,  5th Aug. 1909.

[re: G.D. Maynard, extract from Medical Directory – experience in S. Africa]

‘My dear Pearson,

I return revise [sic] with its extended bibliography &c. Don’t bother about the puppy skins till quite convenient; I want to see them in order to know whether Usher & I are using “fawn” to describe the same colour. They are extraordinarily interesting, Mendelism or none; I don’t see why the cream coated one with pale “liver” patches & pink eyes should not count as an albino, as much as a good few of our own that were comparatively dark for a time & got lighter, or even, as in our Patty, practically white later on. But the black & white particoloured ones are nowhere on that theory so far as I can see; but I don’t pretend to understand the more complicated formula.

I think Usher means to go on breeding & on a rather bigger scale has got an old barn a shed cheap that will when divided up take, I think he said 8, dogs’ & is to have a man to see to them. He will of course always be open to suggestions from you or me as to what crosses may be desirable.

It is odd that 2 Aberdeen oculists (I dislike the word but there it is) should have gone into scientific breeding.

...’

‘My dear Pearson,

Hair from Pekingese – 6 animals.

I. II. III. IV. – from Mrs Franklin. Sufficient particulars in packets.

V. V [sic] – from Mrs Dew-Smith; 2 samples from same animal, in separate packets – sufficient particulars thereon.

VI. “Gollywog” (Mrs Mayhew) a nearly black ♂ hybrid between albino ♂ & pure black ♀. See memorandum on other side [of letter].

I got Mrs. M. to lend me Gollywog yesterday for your Tong. Colonel M. (Mrs M.’s husband) told me he thought this dog no use & on trial we found he took absolutely no notice of her; & this morning I found on examining him that he has no trace of testicles & the penis quite small;- disappointing. – We are therefore putting Jack o Tong again.

I will report when Tong is ready to return.

I have other letters &c. to attend to & not much time.

Yrs very sincerely,

E. Nettleship.

I am going to lend you skin of Jill’s dead coloured puppy to see & take sample from, but have not time today.

[reverse:]

Memo as to “Gollywog” – He looks black at 1st sight but the free ends of many of the mane & tail hairs are very dark red-brown; also there is a sprinkling of quite white hairs especially in tail & that region; also a pure white blaze a patch on chest between four legs, & some pure white on some of the toes. Irides dark brown – nose black. He is impotent,- testicles undescended & penis quite small. He is lame from some disease of L. hip that came after distemper but otherwise strong & well & can go for 10 miles a day quite easily. His voice is like a puppy’s & he is remarkably quiet & unexcitable, but very affectionate.

Gollywog’s father is “Ching,” an albino of the Jack type; both Ching’s parents were albino his father being the same as Tong 1st’s father, his mother a full sister of Tong’s mother but of a different litter i.e. Ching & Tong are sibs. by their father, 1st cousins by their mothers.

Gollywog’s mother is reported to be absolutely black all over I have not seen her, & probably shall not be able to; I will enquire for her pedigree but am doubtful of getting it.’

‘...

I have letters from Usher about his mouse eyes & hope to examine Coats’s at Moorfields tomorrow. Usher’s & Coats’s exams. agree in general; both find that the dark-red-pupil mice have partially albinotic iris & choroid. We must of course have rather more detail.

I saw a fashionable very busy Vet. today (Hobday) who knows all about breed dogs. He says Albsm. is not so very rare in Pekingese, but that the albino puppies not being wanted are usually “knocked on the head”. He knows but little, I gather, of albsm. i[n] other breeds, but spoke of “white” Bull terriers as deaf;- I think he meant albinotic Bull terriers; I don’t think he meant mere ordinary white haired ones. An Ophth. friend (Higgens) told me yesterday he once had a perfectly albinc. bull terrier that was quite deaf & was run over & killed in consequence.

...’

‘My dear Pearson,

I was finishing off your last batch of Plates &c. yesterday when a telegram came from Usher asking to come down. – He is just back from an 8 months tour & has enquired & got material about albinos at very many places from Ceylon to Australia & Japan, including Fiji, New Guinea & many smaller islands. He has brought many photographs of albinos & several new pedigrees; also additions to our Fig. 180 (Fijian) which must be inserted. – His material is specially important in reference to the spotted albinos. These are born spotless, & if they wear clothes they remain white, but those (the majority) who go naked get covered with large brown spots except on the parts (inside of arms e.g.) which the sun does not reach.

...

You will I expect agree that we must reproduce some of his photos?

Also would you think well to ask him to write a section or short chapter on his experience of these “coloured” albinos? He has got his notes & would do it better in some ways than we could, or at least more easily. But he is modest & also will be head over ears in arrears of work when he gets to Aberdeen; but if you agree you can back up the suggestion, for I have told him I am suggesting it to you.

...’