Heredity, Variation and Genius %$ 



The principle of the theory then is that two 

 such different characters do not blend and in- 

 dividually disappear in the conjunction of the 

 germ-cells, but are sorted out to their several 

 places and stored separately to reappear in future 

 reproduction ; carried bodily, it may be supposed, 

 in the chromosomes or the imagined still more 

 minute chromomeres of the nucleus; for here, as 

 elsewhere, scientific imagination, outrunning accu- 

 rate observation and verification, is apt to become 

 imaginative science. When new forms appear for 

 the first time in hereditary transmission they are 

 created by simple recombinations of characters 

 derived from original parents ; and in like manner 

 when on crossing plants a reversion takes place, 

 e.g., when two cultivated white-flowered plants 

 exhibit the original wild purple flower, what 

 happens is that two parted complementary colours 

 which have been somehow separated by variation 

 concur and gladly combine again. All this is easily 

 imaginable in case of such simple character as 

 tallness or shortness of pea-plants and blackness 

 or whiteness of flowers and animals, where it is 

 possible to define and handle a so-called unit- 

 character ; but it must be anything but easy, indeed 

 obviously impossible, to separate definitely such 

 unit-characters in the manifold physiological 

 features, mental and bodily, of a complete unity 

 like the human body. There is yet no certain 

 evidence that the transmission even of colour- 

 characters in man follows the Mendelian rules as 



