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The adoption of the cap and gown is one of the striking atavistic features of modern college life, and at the same time it marks the fact that these colleges have definitely become leisure-class establishments, either in actual achievement or in aspiration.
These sentiments are atavistic residuum of the instincts of the primitive man, which the fear of punishment obliges the isolated and responsible individual to curb. Thus it is that crowds are so easily led into the worst excesses.
But such cases are so infrequent that they may well be counted atavistic, that is, of the nature of a tendency to return to a previous merely animal condition. For the most part, it is true of all normal women that the presence of the ovum in the womb makes little difference, one way or another, in regard to their desire for, or aversion to, the act of coitus.
The precise date at which the reversion to cap and gown took place, as well as the fact that it affected so large a number of schools at about the same time, seems to have been due in some measure to a wave of atavistic sense of conformity and reputability that passed over the community at that period.
Those addicted to it might be indulging an atavistic taste at the expense of their humanity. It would then be in the position now occupied by mythology and mysticism. Even as it is, mathematicians share with musicians a certain partiality in their characters and mental development.
Is it good to hope on a 13th, or is it mere foolishness to thing about such things? Who knows? for we have become unnatural and abnormal subject to atavistic tendencies in thought and action.... Most people are keeping their thoughts to themselves, but actions cannot be hidden. You would not believe some of the things.... There has not been a sign or a word from the relief column for many hours.
It was more than mere extension of interest with them; it was more than ambition's haughtiest fight; it was the sun-dried, wind-shriveled, tried-out atavistic blood-thirst made holy by the approval of the Good God they knew. The miniature war-party got at last into the Absaroke country.
All remembered the brutal encounter of the two brothers years before, when, throwing him to the ground, Attalaq jumped on his brother's body and striking his head with stones beat him to death. Attalaq was a type of the older warriors; unlike his more gentle tribesmen he possessed the atavistic savagery of his forebears of centuries ago when it was customary to abduct brides.
According to his definition, the merchant Smelkoff was of the genuine Russian type, and had perished in consequence of his generous, trusting nature, having fallen into the hands of deeply degraded individuals. Simeon Kartinkin was the atavistic production of serfdom, a stupefied, ignorant, unprincipled man, who had not even any religion.
You know what that stock is, a good sea-faring strain, and a race of wonderfully fine women, 'atavistic aristocrats' I remember an author in the Atlantic Monthly called them once. I suppose you think it's funny to groan, Gertrude, when anybody makes a literary allusion, but it isn't. Well, anyway, Mrs. O'Farrel knew about this child, and sent for her. She stayed with Mrs.
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