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Updated: May 28, 2025
To bring about that men of our time should uniformly place before themselves the question of the meaning of life, and uniformly answer it, it is only necessary that those who regard themselves as enlightened should cease to think and to inculcate to other generations that religion is atavism, the survival of a past wild state, and that for the good life of men the spreading of education is sufficient i.e. the spread of the most varied knowledge which is in some way to bring men to justice and to a moral life.
"Now, on one occasion, in a flower belonging to an individual of Salvia verticillata, and only on the left stamen, I observed a perfectly developed and pollinigerous lower cell, perfectly homologous with that which is normally developed in Salvia officinalis. This case of atavism is truly singular.
Systematic atavism by this means leads us to a closer examination of the internal and concealed causes, which rule the affinities and divergencies of allied species. It brings before us and emphasizes the importance of the conception of the so-called unit-characters. The primrose will serve as an example.
This fact suggests the idea of a common origin for these anomalies, and would lead to the hypothesis that the original ancestors of the whole family, before losing the bracts, exhibited this peculiar mode of cohesion. Bracts and analogous organs afford similar cases of systematic atavism in quite a number of other families.
We have had great scientists like Darwin investigating our origin, and among the Germans there are several who study the atavism of races, but in general even educated people are perfectly ignorant upon the subject, and they expect little Tommy Jones and Katie Robinson, or Jacques Dubois and Marie Blanc, to have the same instincts as your cousin, Lord Tancred, and you, for instance.
Such is the hypothesis as I understand it. Now let us see how it will stand the various tests which I laid down just now. In the first place, do these supposed causes of the phenomena exist in nature? Is it the fact that in nature these properties of organic matter atavism and variability and those phenomena which we have called the conditions of existence, is it true that they exist?
Hers was not the plain appealing of Olive's Greek statue-like beauty; it was rather the hectic erethism of painters and sculptors in a period preceding the apogee of an art. She was a statuette in biscuit after a design by Andrea Mantegna. But the traces of this exquisite atavism were now almost concealed in the supreme modernity of her attire.
Such sporting individuals have to be extirpated regularly, otherwise the whole variety would soon lose its type and its uniformity and run over to some other form in cultivation in the vicinity. For this reason atavism in nurseries causes much care and labor, and consequently is to be dealt with as a very important factor.
The phenomena themselves consist in the production of anomalies and varieties, and as the genetic relation of the latter is often hardly beyond doubt, the anomalies seem to afford the best instances for the study of systematic atavism.
To that tendency a special name is given it is called 'Atavism', it expresses this tendency to revert to the ancestral type, and comes from the Latin word 'atavus', ancestor.
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