Heredity, Variation and Genius 23 



the endless cycle of becomings and unbecomings 

 of things from everlasting to everlasting. An 

 instructive instance of the same tendency is seen 

 when among variations which continually occur in 

 allied species of animals the abnormal of one is 

 just a reversion to the normal of another species. 

 It is notable that abnormal peculiarities in man 

 are normal in his next of kin — in the gibbon, the 

 orang, the chimpanzee and the gorilla. Varia- 

 tions, even when they seem human, are not there- 

 fore always the new things they seem ; they are 

 sometimes returns to old characters, reminiscences 

 of remote ancestral processes. And this is true 

 of mental as well as of bodily characters, for stray 

 persons are here and there met with — not neces- 

 sarily only the monkey-like idiots to be found in 

 asylums — who exhibit curiously simian-like like- 

 nesses of mind which no education can ever 

 efface : simian-like ancestral vestigies discover- 

 able in human mind as well as in the grasp of the 

 human baby's toes and fingers and its biting or 

 sucking of its toes. Must we then in such cases 

 suppose, according to Mendelian laws of separate 

 inheritance of characters, that unit-characters of 

 the original common stock have been segregated 

 and laid by latent to show themselves again 

 openly and actively after countless ages of 

 evolution ? 



New organic variations being less stable are 

 less likely to last ; they take a long time to get 

 well fixed in descent and are easily unfixed when 



