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Other evidences of man's origin in the lower animals could be drawn from the phenomena of atavism, or arrest of development in parts or organs of the body. Atavism is usually confined within the line of human descent, conditions appearing in many of us which belonged to some of our human ancestors a few generations, occasionally many generations, in the past.
Intimacy did not occur and the offence complained of by Driscoll, that her virtue was solicited, was not repeated. I would deal in especial with atavism. There have been cases of shipwreck and somnambulism in my client's family. If the accused could speak he could a tale unfold one of the strangest that have ever been narrated between the covers of a book.
All the atavism, all the spectral repetition of the thoughts and ideas of the past that can lie dormant in the mind of the individual, leaped to the reinforcement of the harrowing religious impressions which came to me from without. It was not the attitude of my friends that impressed me.
Cold, cunning, calculating; he was, also, in marked contrast to most of his fellows, a slave to that brute passion which the waning demands for procreation upon their dying planet has almost stilled in the Martian breast. The thought that the divine Dejah Thoris might fall into the clutches of such an abysmal atavism started the cold sweat upon me.
The half-breed had tried to convince himself by saying over and over mechanically: "There ain't no hell there ain't no comin' back there ain't nothin' after this," but the denial was only of the lips atavism was stronger than his will. He believed, as much as he believed that on the morrow the sun would rise, in a real and definite hell, filled with the shrieking spirits of the damned.
This conclusion being accepted, the accidental re-apparition of bracts within the family must be considered as a case of systematic atavism, quite analogous to the re-appearance of the scapes in the acaulescent primrose.
Well, this 'Atavism' which I shall speak of, is, as I said before, one of the most marked and striking tendencies of organic beings; but, side by side with this hereditary tendency there is an equally distinct and remarkable tendency to variation.
About the middle of the last century Louis de Vilmorin showed that it was possible to subject plants to the methods of amelioration of races then in use for domestic animals, and since that time atavism has played a large part in all breeding-processes.
If it be a comparatively modern race, owing its peculiarities of conformation to degeneracy, it is an illustration of what botanists call "atavism," or the tendency of varieties to revert to an ancestral type, which type, in proportion to its antiquity, would be of lower grade. General Position of Drift with extinct Mammalia in Valleys. Discoveries of M. Boucher de Perthes at Abbeville.
There does not appear at first sight to be much connection between such distinct and apparently disconnected phenomena as 1, the orderly normal progress of development; 2, atavism and the resumption of feral characteristics; 3, the more ordinary resemblance inter se of nearer relatives; 4, the benefit of an occasional cross, and the usual sterility of hybrids; 5, the unconsciousness with which alike bodily development and ordinary physiological functions proceed, so long as they are normal; 6, the ordinary non-inheritance, but occasional inheritance of mutilations; 7, the fact that puberty indicates the approach of maturity; 8, the phenomena of middle life and old age; 9, the principle underlying longevity.
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