Starting in 1906, William Castle carried out a long study of the effect of selection on coat colour in rats. The piebald or hooded pattern was recessive to the grey wild type. He crossed hooded rats with the black-backed Irish type, and then back-crossed the offspring with pure hooded rats. The dark stripe on the back was bigger. He then tried selecting different groups for bigger or smaller stripes for 5 generations, and found that it was possible to change the characteristics way beyond the initial range of variation. This effectively refuted de Vries's claim that continuous variation could not be inherited permanently, requiring new mutations. By 1911 Castle noted that the results could be explained by Darwinian selection on heritable variation of Mendelian genes.
