Читать книгу Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog - Robert Blatchford - Страница 9

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"Atavism," or "breeding back," or "reversion," may reach back through thousands of generations, and some trait of the cave-man, or the beast, may reappear in a child of Twentieth Century civilisation.

Darwin, in The Descent of Man, Chapter II, gives many instances of "atavism," or breeding back, by human beings to apish and even quadrupedal characteristics. Alluding to a case cited by Mr. J. Wood, in which a man had seven muscles "proper to certain apes," Darwin says:

It is quite incredible that a man should through mere accident abnormally resemble certain apes in no less than seven of his muscles, if there had been no genetic connection between them. On the other hand, if man is descended from some apelike creature, no valid reason can be assigned why certain muscles should not suddenly reappear after an interval of many thousand generations, in the same manner as with horses, asses, and mules, dark-coloured stripes suddenly reappear on the legs and shoulders after an interval of hundreds, or, more probably, of thousands of generations.

Dr. Lydston, in The Diseases of Society (Lippincott: 1904) says:

The outcropping of ancestral types of mentality is observed to underlie many of the manifestations of vice and crime. These ancestral types or traits may revert farther back even than the savage progenitors of civilised man, and approximate those of the lower animals who, in their turn, stand behind the savage in the line of descent.

This "reversion to older and lower types," or "breeding back," is important, because it is the source of much crime—the origin of very many "Bottom Dogs," as we shall see. But at present we need only notice that heredity, or breed, reaches back through immense distances of time; so that a man inherits not only from savage ancestors, but also from the brutes. And man has no power to choose his breed, has no choice of ancestors, but must take the qualities of body and mind they hand down to him, be those qualities good or bad.

Descent, or breed, does not work regularly. Any trait of any ancestor, beast or man, near or remote, may crop up suddenly in any new generation. A child may bear little likeness to its father or mother: it may be more like its great-grandfather, its uncle, or its aunt.

It is as though every dead fore-parent back to the dimmest horizon of time, were liable to put a ghostly finger in the pie, to mend or mar it.

Let us now use a simple illustration of the workings of heredity, variation, and atavism, or breeding back.

There is no need to trouble ourselves with the scientific explanations. What we have to understand is that children inherit qualities from their ancestors; that children vary from their ancestors and from each other; and that old types or old qualities may crop out suddenly and unexpectedly in a new generation. Knowing, as we do, that children inherit from their parents and fore-parents, the rest may be made, quite plain without a single scientific word.

In our illustration we will take for parents and children bottles, and for hereditary qualities beads of different colours.