30 Heredity, Variation and Genius 



As in the nervous system of the child now is 

 the innate organized capacity quickly to learn to 

 walk and talk, a capacity which its ape-like 

 ancestors had to acquire slowly and painfully 

 by long and repeated adaptations generation after 

 generation from the very cradle of humanity — still 

 outlining rudely and briefly in the successive 

 stages of its embryonic development an epitome 

 of the procession of life from its beginnings on 

 earth — so in the occult atomic structure of the 

 germ may offspring inherit a natural drift or 

 tendency originated by ancestral slow acquisition. 



The growth of such inherited tendency by off- 

 spring need not of course take place in all the 

 members of a succeeding generation and may be 

 manifest only in the fulness of time. To germ 

 as to mortal happen time and chance, and each 

 fares well or ill as its fate decrees. In the myste- 

 rious germinal unions in which so many very 

 complex genital factors and conditions are in- 

 volved it is only seldom that the combining ele- 

 ments are so luckily complementary that the 

 perfect product ensues. Moreover, the possible 

 mischances to which a particular germ-tendency 

 acquired by parental experience is liable are in- 

 calculable : it may not survive directly in trans- 

 mission because in the fusion of its germ with 

 the germ of the other sex it is checked, curbed, 

 suppressed, qualified, or quite sorted out and 

 laid by latent, or even perhaps broken up into 

 elements which, obeying their affinities, go to form 



