1858 R. G. Mayne Expos. Lexicon Med. Sci. (1860) 998/1 Polygenicus, applied to a rock which owes its origin to fragments of different rocks united by calcareous cement..; or to divers fragments of homogeneous rocks being united by a variable cement: polygenic.

1870 Nature 14 July 209/2 Study of..meteorites..has made me acquainted with polygenic masses—that is to say, masses formed of angular fragments soldered together.

1939 Geogr. Jrnl. 93 64 The resulting alluvial slope should be considered as the integral of a series of terraces, whence the term ‘polygenic’.

1989 Chem. Geol. 77 306/2 The picrites give rise to either monogenic breccias, or occur within polygenic breccias associated with picritic basalt, basalt and rarely with gabbro.

2003 Jrnl. Quaternary Sci. 18 361 An ebb-dominated area with a polygenic sediment cover.

1868 H. B. Jones & H. Watts Fownes's Man. Elem. Chem. (ed. 10) 240 All other elements are polygenic, uniting with the monogens.

1877 H. Watts Fownes's Man. Chem. (ed. 12) I. 261 It seems most probable that the true quantivalence or atomicity of a polygenic element is that which corresponds with the maximum number of monad atoms with which it can combine.

1927 E. Kasner in Science 16 Dec. 581/2 I have proposed recently..the new term polygenic to describe the case where the limit has many values at a point.

1946 Proc. National Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 32 328 For this class (M) of polygenic functions, the equations (6) play the rôle of the Cauchy-Riemann equations.

1979 Amer. Math. Monthly 86 900/1 Monogenic properties of complex functions (including polygenic and areolar monogenic functions).

2002 CRC Conc. Encycl. Math. 356 If a function is not polygenic, it is monogenic.

1927 Zeitschr. f. Induktive Abstammungs- u. Vererbungslehre 43 331 The discovery of polygenous characters..made it necessary to recognize, that at least a great many characters are determined not by one but by several and even many genes.]

1928 L. F. Whitney Basis of Breeding 87 It is probable that a majority of blending traits in man are polygenic in nature, behaving like the inheritance of skin-color in negro-white crosses.

1940 New Phytologist 39 239 Dr Mather gave an account of work on selection of polygenic characters.

1941 K. Mather in Jrnl. Genetics 41 160 Qualitative variation is usually monogenic or digenic in inheritance. Cases of trigenic and tetragenic inheritance are known, but are relatively rare. In contrast with these, quantitative variation may be said to be polygenic, and this term will be adopted.

1954 Antiquity 28 197 A genetic analysis of such polygenic characters as bone size and shape.

1989 Jrnl. Heredity 80 11/2 Deficiency of the adult corpus callosum in BALB/c mice shows incomplete penetrance, and is clearly polygenic.

2004 Nature 11 Nov. p. xv Inheritance of most common cancers is likely to be polygenic.

1942 Proc. Royal Soc. B. 131 60 The character in question has been shown to behave polygenically in hybrid material.

1976 Nature 23 Sept. 317/1 A common feature of many selection experiments, when polygenically determined traits are involved, is a reduction in the reproductive fitness of the selected strains.

2003 Breast Cancer 97 2160 Sporadic breast carcinoma is polygenically inherited.