In a culture where all individuals are hybrids, in point of pedigree, as is the case with all the leading peoples of Christendom, the ways of this group heredity are particularly devious, and the fortunes of the individual in this respect are in a peculiar degree exposed to the caprice of Mendelian contingencies; so that his make-up, physical and spiritual, is, humanly speaking, in the main a chapter of accidents. Where each individual draws for his hereditary traits on a wide ancestry of unstable hybrids, as all civilised men do, his chances are always those of the common lot, with some slight antecedent probability of his resembling the nearer ones among his variegated ancestry. But he has also and everywhere in this hybrid panmixis an excellent chance of being allotted something more accentuated, for good or ill, in the way of hereditary traits than anything shown by his varied assortment of ancestors. It commonly happens in such a hybrid community that in the new crossing of hybrids that takes place at every marriage, some new idiosyncracy, slight or considerable, comes to light in the offspring, beyond anything visible in the parents or the remoter pedigree; for in the crossing of what may be called multiple-hybrid parents, complementary characters that may have been dormant or recessive in the parents will come in from both sides, combine, re-enforce one another, and cumulatively give an unlooked-for result. So that in a hybrid community the fortunes of all individuals are somewhat precarious in respect of heredity. Such are the conditions which have prevailed among the peoples of Europe since the first beginnings of that culture that has led up to the Western civilisation as known to history. In these circumstances any individual, therefore, owes to the group not only his share of that certain typical complement of traits that characterise the common run, but usually something more than is coming to him in the way of individual qualities and infirmities if he is in any way distinguishable from the common run, as well as a blind chance of transmitting almost any traits that he is not possessed of.[91]