"Atavism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... become typical strawberry plants. In the case of the progressive evolution of a species, the developmental potentiality of B becomes of a higher and higher order. In retrogressive evolution, the contrary would be the case. The phenomena of atavism seem to show that retrogressive evolution that is, the return of a species to one or other of its earlier forms, is a possibility to be reckoned with. The simplification of structure, which is so common in the parasitic members ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... for a great deal, for the milk in a woman's veins sweetens, or at least, dilutes an acrid doctrine, as the blood of the motherly cow softens the virulence of small-pox, so that its mark survives only as the seal of immunity. Another would plead atavism, and say he got his religious instincts from his great-grandfather, as some do their complexion or their temper. Others would be compelled to confess that the belief of a wife or a sister had displaced that ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... know them, are, firstly, circumstances hostile to the particular character in question; secondly, conditions of life incessantly inducing fresh variability; and lastly, the crossing of distinct varieties during some previous generation, together with reversion or atavism—that is, the tendency in the child to resemble its grand-parents or more remote ancestors instead of its immediate parents. This latter subject will be fully discussed ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... belong to the same two forms as their parents; but that a few seedlings belonging to the third form occasionally make their appearance; and this latter fact, as Hildebrand remarks, may be attributed to atavism, as some of their progenitors will almost certainly have ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... facts of comparative anatomy, atavism, and the rudimentary organs, was pointed out by Darwin in the first part of his classic work, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871).[140] In the "General summary and conclusion" (chap. ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... pulled her chair nearer me and the fire, then she began. She chose those poems the least sensuous, and the more abstract. I watched her all the time. She read "Rutland Gate," and her voice showed how she sympathized with the man. Then she read "Atavism," and her little highly bred face looked savage! I realized with a quiver of delight that she is the most passionate creature,—of course she is, with that father and mother! Wait until I have awakened her enough, and she ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... criminal, the ancestral criminality should constitute no bar to the marriage. It is not likely to show itself atavistically in the children. Altogether a good deal of nonsense has been written about atavism. And people forget that the same rules of heredity that are applied to physical conditions cannot be applied to spiritual and moral qualities, the latter being much more dependent upon environment than the former. Of course the various ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... an opening blind in a dark chamber of boorishness and provincialism, suddenly revealing a vista of distant, mistily romantic perspectives. To be sure I had comforted myself with the thought that the race can, at any time and anywhere, bring forth geniuses through atavism; thus also in the family of a Dutch provincial hotel-keeper, a womanly genius of noble grace, charm and distinction; but this was after all much sweeter solace. With a foundling one could presuppose noble ancestors ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... of the United States and Canada offer an inviting field for study in linguistic atavism and barbaric vocal expression. The New York World Almanac for 1895 contains a list of the "yells" of some three hundred colleges and universities in the United States. Out of this great number, in which there is a plenitude of "Rah! rah! rah!" the following ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... is highly characteristic of the whole tribe that the very house in which the Lord Protector was born was monastic, and had been, before the Dissolution, a hospital dedicated to the use of the poor. For the Lord Protector was the son of this Robert, who by a sort of atavism had added to the ample income derived from monastic spoil the profits of a brewery. It was Mrs Cromwell who looked after the brewery, and some appreciable part of the family revenues were derived from it when, in 1617, her husband died, leaving young Oliver, the future Lord Protector, ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... traced their genealogy to a king, and many of them to a god. Thorwaldsen did both—first to Harold Hildestand, King of Denmark, and then, with the help of several kind old gran'mamas, to the god Thor. His love for mythology was an atavism. In childhood the good old aunties used to tell him how the god Thor once trod the earth and shattered the mountains with his hammer. From Thor and the World his first ancestor was born, so the family name ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... of the domestic animals—dogs, for instance, and their offspring. In all these cases of propagation and perpetuation, there seems to be a tendency in the offspring to take the characters of the parental organisms. 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 ...
— The Perpetuation Of Living Beings, Hereditary Transmission And Variation • Thomas H. Huxley
... find children who offer a striking resemblance to a paternal grandfather, a maternal aunt or a maternal great-grandmother. This is known as atavism. There are many curious variations with regard to the inheritance of ancestral traits. Some children show a remarkable resemblance to their fathers in childhood, others to their mothers. And many qualities of certain individual ancestors appear quite suddenly late in life. Everything may be inherited, ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... strange freak of atavism the father of the boy bred back, and was more or less of a Stone-Age cave-dweller. He was a butcher by trade, in the little town of Waldorf, a few miles from Heidelberg. A butcher's business then was to travel around and kill the pet pig, or sheep, or cow that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... on Reversion to ancestral characters, or atavism, are profoundly suggestive. What can be more wonderful, the author asks, than that some trifling peculiarity should be transmitted through a long course of development, and ultimately reappear in the offspring when mature or even when old? Nevertheless, ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... and the last pages, such as, alas! they are. And I may even say that in this case the moral itself was given me; for it arose immediately on a comparison of the mother and the daughter, and from the hideous trick of atavism in the first. Sometimes a parabolic sense is still more undeniably present in a dream; sometimes I cannot but suppose my Brownies have been aping Bunyan, and yet in no case with what would possibly be called a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... short story, "The Redemption", is intended to portray a righteous transformation from conventional false morality to true Christian life, but in reality presents a very repulsive picture of bestial atavism. The meaner character was not "reformed by mercy", but merely withheld from wholesale vice by isolation. Mr. Hart is so plainly in earnest when he relates this dismal tale as a sermon, that we must not be too harsh in questioning ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... undoubtedly a Norman, and, according to those who knew him best, many of his traits of character show that atavism is not ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant |
