ABSTRACT
Aft er Lucifer’s death in 1932 , the problem of the male calico seems to have been temporarily abandoned: I fi nd only a single paper, from 1941, which makes any att empt to deal with it during the next twenty years. Here the research focuses on the study of meiosis taking place in the testes of tabby, black, and yellow cats in the hope of shedding “some light upon the highly complex genetical behaviour of tortoiseshell cats.” The Scott ish researcher reports that the “X and Y sex chromosomes are very similar in size” (the X-chromosome of the cat wasn’t correctly identifi ed until 1965) and behave strangely in a number of diff erent ways; he rather lamely concludes that the tortoiseshell males can be accounted for through “structural peculiarities of the sex chromosomes, particularly those of the Y.”
