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First of all, and this he had previously suspected, he discovered a kind of atavism of faith in this Pyrenean, this son of peasant mountaineers, who had been brought up in belief of the legend, and whom the legend had again mastered even when fifty years, of positive study had rolled over it.
It seems indeed an atavism, a return to modes of feeling that created the monuments of other ages, of barbarous and forgotten times. Well did Berlioz term his work "Babylonian and Ninevitish"! Certainly it is like nothing so much as the cruel and ponderous bulks, the sheer, vast tombs and ramparts and terraces of Khorsabad and Nimroud, bare and oppressive under the sun of Assyria.
This is certainly exceptional, for I scarcely believe in atavism; it seems to me that the new elements brought by the partners, accidents, and the infinite variety of crossings must rapidly efface particular characteristics, so as to bring back the individual to the general type. And there remains variation Helene, Jean, Angelique.
In a lecture on the Icelandic Sagas, I once heard William Morris say that all really respectable Icelanders traced their genealogy to a king, and many of them to a god. Thorwaldsen did both first to Harold Hildestand, King of Denmark, and then, with the help of several kind old gran'mamas, to the god Thor. His love for mythology was an atavism.
To be a magician one must believe in magic, unless one would be a mere conjurer. Guido at least knew enough not to answer the girl's last question with a string of so-called scientific theories about atavism and transmitted recollections. If he had taken that ground he would have been surprised to find that Cecilia Palladio was quite as familiar with it as himself.
On the other hand there is a larger group of cases of reversion by buds, which is probably not of hybrid nature, nor due to innate inconstancy of the variety, but must be considered as pure atavism. I refer to the bud-variations of so many of our cultivated varieties of shrubs and trees. Many of them are cultivated because of their foliage.
I suppose that here is an instance of atavism, that the child throw back for thousands or tens of thousands of years, to when her progenitors were savages, and that their primitive instincts have reasserted themselves in her, although she was born in the twentieth century. She had been ten months in the Home and was doing well.
What is Mr. Darwin's hypothesis? As I apprehend it for I have put it into a shape more convenient for common purposes than I could find 'verbatim' in his book as I apprehend it, I say, it is, that all the phenomena of organic nature, past and present, result from, or are caused by, the inter-action of those properties of organic matter, which we have called ATAVISM and VARIABILITY, with the CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE; or, in other words, given the existence of organic matter, its tendency to transmit its properties, and its tendency occasionally to vary; and, lastly, given the conditions of existence by which organic matter is surrounded that these put together are the causes of the Present and of the Past conditions of ORGANIC NATURE.
It was a constant wonder to him that such conditions had been able to produce a woman like Florence Fenacre. "You are the flower of ze prairie," he would say, "an atavism of type, harking back a dozen generations to aristocratic progenitors, having nothing in common with the Pathfinder your Papa!" "He wasn't a pathfinder," said Florence, "he was a whaler captain."
This special adaptation, which places the leaves in alternating pairs, replaced and concealed the old and universal arrangement on a screw line. In disappearing, it leaves the latter free, and according to the rule of systematic atavism, this now becomes active and takes its place.
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