CHAPTER IV. 



REVERSION. 



THIS tendency to revert or " throw back " to the 

 original stock is a wise provision of Nature. It acts 

 as a corrective. It is the genealogical gardener who 

 keeps a watchful eye upon all distorted offshoots, 

 brings them into proper line or lops them off, and so 

 keeps the family tree shapely and free from glaring 

 deformity. Were it not for this law of reversion all 

 those extreme variations from the true family type, 

 however hideous or useless, which from time to time 

 arise from some extraordinary action of the environ- 

 ment or unhappy blending of parental characters, or 

 both, might be repeated and exaggerated indefinitely, 

 even till the true type of the family would be lost in 

 a crowd of mongrels and monsters. Of course the 

 action of the environment would not tolerate this, and 

 so the family would become extinct. 



When the individual, from whatever cause, varies so 

 far from the present existing type of his family as to 

 be out of harmony with it, he must also be out of 

 harmony with his environment, for the family type 

 is the resultant of the survival of the fittest, which 



