| Abstract: | Numerous occurrences of natural hybridization have been known in many groups of animals. It has a bearing on growth, nomenclature, speciation, genetics and wildlife management. It is well recognised that demonstration of intermediacy based on several characters makes the identification of hybrids more certain than that based on just a single character, and that differences among the hybrids and the parental populations should be analysed for variations due to the additive genetic (A) and the non-additive genetic (NA) factors separately. In the present paper (i) it is pointed out that sometimes the assumption that covariance matrices of the hybrids and the parental populations are equal, may not be valid, and (ii) a multivariate method of testing hypotheses analysing differences between the hybrids and the parents, qualified by the A and the NA factors, when covariance matrices are not equal, is submitted. |
