208 CEOSSING AND CLOSE-INTERBREEDING. 



the extent, only, of one, two, or half a dozen instances), 

 preponderant in favor of the view, that evil does result; 

 he would have declared, upon the infallible authority 

 of those statistics, that evil always does result from 

 close interbreeding, or from consanguineous mar- 

 riages; and this, despite his laudable desire to curtail 

 the tyranny which priestcraft exercises over the vulgar, 

 — principally, by withholding from them, all statistics ! 

 Darwin is a disciple of Buckle (in the second 

 volume of his "Animals and Plants under Domestica- 

 tion,'' the former, in a plaintive tone, regrets that Mr. 

 Buckle's rigid processes of discovery precluded his 

 acceptance of the evidence, showing Inheritance, be- 

 cause the results had not been formulated in statistics, 

 and were, therefore, not susceptible of addition, and of 

 comparison, by sums). Following out Buckle's pro- 

 cess, and prompted thereto by an ulterior aim to which 

 we shall later advert, Darwin affects to believe that, in 

 the solution of the question of interbreeding, where 

 there is such an amount of conflicting evidence, it 

 merely behooves him, to ascertain the weight of the 

 different testimony, and then to determine for the side, 

 which he finds preponderant. The weight of the 

 testimony appears to be overwhelming, in favor of the 

 view, that evils do flow from interbreeding. There- 

 fore, he concludes, that evil inevitably follows, and is 

 always eventually caused by the mating of relations. 

 The exceptional phenomena are allowed to care for 

 themselves. As he postulated "an innate tendency," 

 to stop all inquiry into the cause of variations, so he 

 here lumps i all of the phenomena of crossing and of 



