GENETICS 159 



Precisely. There is racial (communal) physiological 

 property and there is individual (private) physiological 

 property. The former is by far the more important, established 

 as it is by protracted endeavour, solidly supported by a number 

 of biological correspondences, fixed and purged by repeated 

 fertilisation processes. It stands to reason, therefore, that the 

 more evanescent "characters" are generally of comparatively 

 recent origin, and that they constitute no more than 

 "private" property which has not yet been through the 

 " Mendelian" mill sufficiently to constitute it racial property. 

 It has yet to be proved by various biological (bio-economic) 

 tests whether this " private " property contains elements that 

 can presently be turned to good racial account or otherwise. 



The legitimacy of " private " property thus depends on much 

 the same factors in organic as in human society (and so does 

 that of "distribution" of wealth generally). As Ruskin has 

 it: " "Wealth ill-used is as the net of the spiders, entangling 

 and destroying; but wealth well used is as the net of the 

 sacred fisher who gathers souls of men out of the deep." 



Dr. Walker also says that domesticated races possess a 

 character in common, or rather an exaggeration of a character 

 which is not present in wild races. In my opinion, this con- 

 sists mainly in the fact that they are surfeited because deprived 

 of a genuine bio-economic independence a similar bio- 

 economic retrogression producing similar metabolic 

 abnormalities, and similar exaggerations everywhere. Just as 

 in human society the institution of slavery always produced 

 unfavourable (dysgenic) " characters," or tended to exaggerate 

 existing unfavourable ones, so the one-sided exploitation of 

 organisms in domestication results in undesirable abnormalities 

 and exaggerations. 



The common tendency, as is well known, is to produce 

 "large " variations, i.e., bulk at the expense of symbiogenesis 

 and of survival values. 



The domesticated races are also notable for their greater 

 variability than wild races. This is, according to Dr. Walker, 



