94 NO STRUGGLE NO SELECTION 



of Mr. Herbert Spencer, who, speaking of heredity, 

 startled his congregation by averring that a sudden gust 

 of passion in a private house in London to-day might 

 bear fruit a thousand years hence in a series of fright- 

 ful murders in Australia or in the wilds of Africa. 



Let us see how Darwin maintains his contention. 

 The paragraph which I now quote occurs in a disquisi- 

 tion where he is apparently dealing with specific 

 characters, but, as will be seen, the paragraph has 

 reference not to specific characters, but to individual 

 differences, and thus illustrates his habit of confusing 

 those two very different things. As before, I mark off 

 the different sentences with alphabetical letters 

 enclosed in brackets, for the sake of comment. 



The paragraph runs thus : " (a) No doubt it is a 

 very surprising fact that characters should reappear, 

 after having been lost for many, probably for hundreds 

 of generations. (6) But when a breed has been 

 crossed only once by some other breed, the offspring 

 occasionally show for many generations a tendency to 

 revert in character to the foreign breed some say 

 for a dozen, or even a score of generations, (c) After 

 twelve generations the proportion of blood (to use a 

 common expression) from one ancestor is only 1 in 

 2048, and yet, as we see, it is generally believed that 

 a tendency to reversion is retained by the remnant of 

 foreign blood, (d) In a breed which has not been 

 crossed, but in which both parents have lost some 

 character which their progenitor possessed, the 

 tendency, whether strong or weak, to reproduce the 



