524 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF BIOLOGICAL RESULTS 



A shepherd's cottage garden was swahowed up in a deer-forest 

 and became a garden full of weeds ; generations passed and it 

 ./ was once more delved ; the long dormant seeds were reawakened 

 * and many old-fashioned flowers saw the light. So there may- 

 be a reawakening of almost forgotten flowers and weeds in that 

 garden which we call our inheritance. Thus we interpret 

 biologically what we cannot ignore in the body politic, the 

 emergence of the old-fashioned type whom we — foxes without 

 tails — think to dispose of under the label " reactionary " ; of the 

 restless type " neither to hand nor bind," who may be a Moses 

 with reawakened nomad instincts capable of leading a people 

 through the desert to a new Promised Land ; or, as is often 

 the case, of the recrudescent vicious type, who, if he cannot be 

 pardoned when we know all, can at least be the better dealt with 

 the better he is understood. 



Another aspect of heredity has an obvious sociological signifi- 

 cance, the dark and intricate business of hybridisation or cross- 

 breeding, in regard to which biologists are beginning to see 

 some daylight. If we call mankind a species, we must admit 

 that there are many sub-species or " elementary species," and 

 that within these again there are minor groups of more or less 

 well-marked stocks, and that there are also somewhat divergent 

 groups or varieties. As in the past, so still there is no small 

 amount of exogamy or cross-breeding, and it is much to be 

 desired that the whole matter should be carefully investigated. 

 How far is it true that cross-breeding provokes an " epidemic 

 of variations," that it tends to induce " reversions," that the 

 older stock is prepotent over the younger, and so on ? Ac- 

 cording to De Vries it is very generally true of plants, that a 

 retrogressive variety {i.e. one different from the parent species 

 in the marked absence of some character) will, if crossed by a 

 typical member of the species, produce offspring which return 

 to the original type. Is there any. analogue of this " false 

 atavism or vicinism " in human kind ? 



