336 THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS 



marriage to take place, the inherited and developed 

 qualities of the one race will be liable to crop up in the 

 next generation, diversely intermixed in every variety of 

 degree with the inherited and developed qualities of the 

 other. The children may take after either parent in any 

 combination of qualities whatsoever. You have admitted 

 an apparently capricious element of individuality : a power 

 on the part of the half-breeds of differing from one another 

 to an extent quite impossible in the two original homo- 

 geneous societies. In one word, you have made possible 

 tlie future existence of diversity in character. 



If, now, we turn from these perfectly simple savage 

 communities to our own very complex and heterogeneous 

 world, what do we find ? An endless variety of soldiers, 

 sailors, tinkers, tailors, butchers, bakers, candlestick 

 makers, and jolly undertakers, most of whom fall into a 

 certain rough number of classes, each with its own deve- 

 loped and inherited traits and peculiarities. Our world ia 

 made up, like the world of ancient Egypt and of modern 

 India, of an immense variety of separate castes — not, 

 'indeed, rigidly demarcated and strictly limited as in those 

 extremely hierarchical societies, but still very fairly here- 

 ditary in character, and given on the average to a tolerably 

 close system of intermarriage within the caste. 



For example, there is the agricultural labourer caste — 

 the Hodge Chawbacon of urban humour, who in his mili- 

 tary avatar also reappears as Tommy Atkins, a little trans- 

 figured, but at bottom identical — the alternative aspect 

 of a single undivided central reality. Hodge for the 

 most part lives and dies in his ancestral village : marries 

 Mary, the daughter of Hodge Secundus of that parish, and 

 begets assorted Hodges and Marys in vast quantities, all 

 of the same pattern, to replenish the earth in the next 

 generation. There you have a very well-marked lieredi- 



