We should expect that our domesticated plants and animals should vary
most, inasmuch as these have been subjected to changed conditions which
would disturb the memory, and, breaking the chain of recollection,
through failure of some one or other of the associated ideas, would thus
directly and most markedly affect the reproductive system. Every reader
of Mr. Darwin will know that this is what actually happens, and also that
when once a plant or animal begins to vary, it will probably vary a good
deal further; which, again, is what we should expect—the disturbance of
the memory introducing a fresh factor of disturbance, which has to be
dealt with by the offspring as it best may. Mr. Darwin writes: “All our
domesticated productions, with the rarest exceptions, vary far more than
natural species” (“Plants and Animals,” &c., vol. ii. p. 241, ed. 1875).
On my third supposition, _i.e._, when the difference between parents has
not been great enough to baffle reproduction on the part of the first
cross, but when the histories of the father and mother have been,
nevertheless, widely different—as in the case of Europeans and Indians—we
should expect to have a race of offspring who should seem to be quite
clear only about those points, on which their progenitors on both sides
were in accord before the manifold divergencies in their experiences
commenced; that is to say, the offspring should show a tendency to revert
to an early savage condition.
That this indeed occurs may be seen from Mr. Darwin’s “Plants and Animals
under Domestication” (vol. ii. p. 21, ed. 1875), where we find that
travellers in all parts of the world have frequently remarked “_on the
degraded state and savage condition of crossed races of man_.” A few
lines lower down Mr. Darwin tells us that he was himself “struck with the
fact that, in South America, men of complicated descent between Negroes,
Indians, and Spaniards seldom had, whatever the cause might be, a good
expression.” “Livingstone” (continues Mr. Darwin) “remarks, ‘It is
unaccountable why half-castes are so much more cruel than the Portuguese,
but such is undoubtedly the case.’ An inhabitant remarked to
Livingstone, ‘God made white men, and God made black men, but the devil
made half-castes.’” A little further on Mr. Darwin says that we may
“perhaps infer that the degraded state of so many half-castes _is in part
due to reversion to a primitive and savage condition_, _induced by the
act of crossing_, even if mainly due to the unfavourable moral conditions
under which they are generally reared.” Why the crossing should produce
this particular tendency would seem to be intelligible enough, if the
fashion and instincts of offspring are, in any case, nothing but the
memories of its past existences; but it would hardly seem to be so upon
any of the theories now generally accepted; as, indeed, is very readily
admitted by Mr. Darwin himself, who even, as regards purely-bred animals
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