  We investigate the evolution of the skewness of the distribution of density
fluctuations in CDM models with both Gaussian and non--Gaussian initial
fluctuations. We show that the method proposed by Coles \& Frenk (1991), which
uses the skewness of galaxy counts to test the hypothesis of Gaussian
primordial density fluctuations, is a potentially powerful probe of initial
conditions. As expected, the mass distribution in models with initially
non--Gaussian fluctuations shows systematic departures from the Gaussian
behaviour on intermediate to large scales. We investigate the effect of
peculiar velocity distortions and normalisation upon the relationship between
skewness and variance. These effects are generally small for the models we
consider. Comparing our results to the QDOT measurements of the skewness, we
find that our initially positive--skew models are clearly excluded by this
analysis, but the available data do not rule out the negative--skew models.
