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speak, it declares this to be the action of marriage 

 with no uncertain voice. What, then, are we to think 

 of Darwin's " Some say " as evidence for what seems 

 to be an impossibility, viz. the transmission, 

 whether explicit or latent, of individual characters 

 " for a dozen or even a score of generations " ? 



(c) In the twelfth generation of the descendants 

 of the ancestor the fraction of his blood remaining in 

 each individual is 1 in 4096, and in the twentieth, 

 less than one in a million parts. 



It is quite as easy, apparently, for Darwin to 

 believe that individual variations can be transmitted 

 to the twentieth as to the twelfth generation ; and I 

 agree with him, with this difference, that while he 

 believes such transmission to be possible and to take 

 place in both cases, I believe that it is as impossible 

 in the one case as in the other. 



Take note of his change of expression. In the 

 previous sentence it was " Some say " ; it is now 

 " And yet, as we see, it is generally believed." 

 This is characteristic. Most readers of the Origin 

 of Species cannot have failed to note that while he 

 introduces each new hypothesis by " We may suppose," 

 or " Let us assume," when next the assumption is 

 met with, it is introduced as a law of Nature by some 

 such phrase as " As we have seen."-? 



(d) This is not an easy sentence to understand. 

 Does the word " breed " refer to an individual or to 

 the collective breed ? In the latter case, the state- 

 ment that both parents have lost some character 



t o-f 



