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Hereditary Genius
xix
step forward has been made in the course of evolution. When natural
selection favours a particular sport, it works effectively towards the
formation of a new species, but the favour that it simultaneously shows to
mere variations seems to be thrown away, so far as that end is concerned.
There may be entanglement between a sport and a variation which leads
to a hybrid and unstable result, “well exemplified in the imperfect character
of the fusion of different human races. Here numerous pure specimens of
their several ancestral types are apt to crop out, notwithstanding the
intermixture by marriage that had been going on for many previous
generations.
It has occurred to others as well as myself, as to Mr. Wallace and to
Professor Romanes, that the time may have arrived when an institute for
experiments on heredity might be established with advantage. A farm and
garden of a very few acres, with varied exposure, and well supplied with
water, placed under the charge of intelligent caretakers, supervised by a
biologist, would afford the necessary basis for a great variety of research
upon inexpensive animals and plants. The difficulty lies in the smallness of
the number of competent persons who are actively engaged in hereditary
inquiry, who could be depended upon to use it properly.
The direct result of this inquiry is to make manifest the great and
measurable differences between the mental and bodily faculties of
individuals, and to prove that the laws of heredity are as applicable to the
former as to the latter. Its indirect result is to show that a vast but unused
power is vested in each generation over the very natures of their
successors—that is, over their inborn faculties and dispositions. The brute
power of doing this by means of appropriate marriages or abstention from
marriage undoubtedly
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