CHAPTER V 



THE LAWS OF DESCENT 



HAVING now given our reader some idea of the hypothesis 

 of my treatise, we will proceed to devote a few chapters to 

 some of the more important issues of argument, for it is all- 

 important to a clear understanding of such a subject as the 

 one we are now reviewing that the reader and the writer 

 shall view the same mental edifice from the same standpoint, 

 otherwise an entirely different view is taken by different minds, 

 and to get a proper understanding it is necessary that both 

 reader and writer should meet on a common ground of hypo- 

 thesis and definition, and when they have so met and can 

 comprehend each other, they can then compare their differ- 

 ences of opinion without causing mutual confusions. 



So I intend to devote the rest of Book I. to the elucidation 

 of facts or of arguments, the use in common parlance and 

 concrete acceptance of which are very different from their 

 abstract meaning. For in common parlance they are re- 

 ceived as applicable to the age in which we live and 

 exist, and in our case it is necessary to use them in the sense 

 best suited to all times and ages, or to the particular demands 

 of Evolution as the time under discussion. In this way we 

 will now take the Laws of Descent, which govern the law of 

 the survival of the fittest. Now, there is nothing God lays 

 more stress upon in the biblical account of the creation than 

 the law that like begets like, and that what is bred in the 

 bone comes out in the blood. I therefore intend to point out 

 that although in many matters of detail these laws are to 

 every appearance scarcely visible or, rather, unrecognizable, 

 yet when we review them the combined collection of circum- 

 stances in the main cases of repetitions are so marked as to 

 leave such a clear and unmistakable course of reproductions as 

 will suffice to form a broad general rule out of what at first 

 glance only appeared to be a diversified conglomeration of 

 distinct and wholly separated occurrences. Just as, for ex- 



