"Atavism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... theory of heredity is that it never fails. If the son has blue, and the father black, eyes, all is right again, for either the mother, or the grandmother, or some historic or prehistoric ancestor, may have had blue eyes, and atavism, we know, will assert itself after hundreds ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... The Dream A Ruler of Men The Atavism of John Tom Little Bear Helping the Other Fellow The Marionettes The Marquis and Miss Sally A Fog in Santone The Friendly Call A Dinner at ——* Sound and Fury Tictocq Tracked to Doom A Snapshot at the President An Unfinished Christmas Story The Unprofitable Servant Aristocracy ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... picture—or call it atavism if you will—which adorned Miss Slayback's dun-colored walls was a passe-partout snowscape, night closing in, and pink cottage windows peering out from under eaves. She could visualize that interior as if she had only to turn the frame for the smell of wood fire and the snap ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... have been so talked by the more superstitious Bayreuth pilgrims into regarding Die Gotterdammerung as the mighty climax to a mighty epic, more Wagnerian than all the other three sections put together, as not to dare notice this startling atavism, especially if we find the trio-conjurations more exhilarating than the metaphysical discourses of Wotan in the three true music dramas of The Ring. There is, however, no real atavism involved. Die Gotterdammerung, though the ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... Oriental theory are simply reversions, as a naturalist would say, to the original type. They are instances of "atavism," like the occasional appearance of six fingers on one hand in a family where the great-great-grandfather happened to possess that ornament. Such instances can always be found, when one takes the pains ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... non-transmission of acquired modifications is incongruous with the great fact of atavism. But the great law of the inheritance of that which is a development of the transmissible type does not necessarily imply the inheritance of modifications acquired by the individual. Because English children may inherit blue eyes and flaxen hair from their Anglo-Saxon ancestors, it by no means ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... 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 of a group, however, does not properly come under ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... distinction) of species is accounted for principally by the last named law, by means of which Eimer also explains the so-called atavism or reversion. To this law are joined other factors, e.g., development proceeding in leaps, as demonstrated by Koelliker and Heer; local separation (through migration; prevention of fertilization, e.g., the impossibility of ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... cases of polymazia in females and 22 in males, thinks that accessory breasts or nipples are due to atavism, and that our most remote inferiorly organized ancestors had many breasts, but that by constantly bearing but one child, from being polymastic, females have gradually become bimastic. Some of the older philosophers contended that by the presence of two breasts woman was originally ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... foot or its coverings, and to regard them as a special sexual fascination, is not without significance for the interpretation of the sporadic manifestations of foot-fetichism among ourselves. Eccentric as foot-fetichism may appear to us, it is simply the re-emergence, by a pseudo-atavism or arrest of development, of a mental or emotional impulse which was probably experienced by our forefathers, and is often traceable among young children to-day.[19] The occasional reappearance of this bygone impulse and the stability which it may ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... atavism, then, seized Robert Walmsley and possessed him. A queer thing he noticed in connection with it was that Alicia, sitting at his side, suddenly seemed to him a stranger. She did not belong to this recurrent phase. Never before had she seemed so remote, so colorless ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... extent discouraged by circumcision, and meddling with the father's slave-girls and concubines would be risking cruel punishment if not death. Hence they use each other by turns, a "puerile practice" known as Alish-Takish, the Lat. facere vicibus or mutuum facere. Temperament, media, and atavism recommend the custom to the general; and after marrying and begetting heirs, Paterfamilias returns to the Ganymede. Hence all the odes of Hafiz are addressed to youths, as proved by such Arabic exclamations as 'Afaka 'llah Allah assain thee (masculine)[FN400]: the object is ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... 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 ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... bleeding, writhing in the horrible suffering we inflict on them, seeking to flee on their poor broken paws or desperately beating their wings, which can no longer support them. . . . The excuse is the impulse of that imperious atavism which the best of us have not the strength ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... friend Carter Johnson wore through some years, rose to be a corporal, finally a sergeant, and did many daring deeds. An atavism from "the old border riders" of Scotland shone through the boy, and he took on quickly. He could act the others off the stage and sing them out of the ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... 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 Latin ...
— The Perpetuation Of Living Beings, Hereditary Transmission And Variation • Thomas H. Huxley
... exemplifies a less advanced stage of progressive development and improvement. If it be a comparatively modern race, owing its peculiarities of conformation to degeneracy, it is an illustration of what botanists call "atavism," or the tendency of varieties to revert to an ancestral type, which type, in proportion to its antiquity, would be of lower grade. To this hypothesis, of a genealogical connection between Man and the lower animals, I shall again allude in the ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... virtue lay in this: he had not become hardened in the mould baked by his several forbears and into which he had been pressed by his mother's hands. Some atavism had been at work in the making of him, and he had reverted to that ancestor who sturdily uplifted. But so far this portion of his heritage had lain dormant. He had simply remained adjusted to a stable environment. There had been no call upon the adaptability which was his. But whensoever the call ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... legitimate offspring from any two forms of Oxalis tend to 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 belonged to ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... sombre facts of city life a throbbing, many-tinted romance, even as out of that foul coal-tar some, who know the secret, craftily distil most delicate perfumes and colours exquisite. The bard of the future ... h'm! Will he ever appear? As an atavism, perhaps. Take away from modern poetry what appeals to primitive man—the jingle and pathetic fallacy—and the residue, if any, would be better ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... I—I told your grandfather so years ago, but he pledged me on his deathbed—and your father was wild and clever like Carl and singular in his notions. I'll never forget your grandfather's face when you ran away into the forest to sleep as a child. He was white and sick and muttered something about atavism. ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... of cases, illegitimate and outcast from the normal education of either race; they are brought up in homes that are the battle-grounds of conflicting cultures; they labour under a heavy premium of disadvantage. There is, of course, a passing suggestion of Darwin's to account for atavism that might go to support the theory of the vileness of half-breeds, if it had ever been proved. But, then, it never has been proved. There is no proof in the ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... ideas, these; some perhaps only half-consciously present to him, so that even in this very Congress the note of jealousy is heard, the claim of an earlier prophet insisted on fiercely. For a moment the dignified assembly, becomes a prey to atavism, reproduces the sordid squabbles of the Kahal. As if every movement was not fed by subterranean fires, heralded by obscure rumblings, though 'tis only the earthquake or the volcanic jet which leaps ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... we see a striking illustration of what the biologists call the law of Atavism. There is a constant tendency to return to the primitive type. We can form some idea of what early Christianity was by reading the Acts of the Apostles. The true believers went about preaching in season and out of season; they cried and prayed with a loud ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... who ought to be in a home," remarked his senior officer dispassionately. "Get a saw as soon as you can, and cut through the board. And if the bally shell goes off and kills you, it'll serve you right. You're a disease, FitzPercy, that's what you are. A walking microbe; an example of atavism; a throw-back to the tail period." Still muttering, his company commander passed out of sight, leaving the triumphant Percy completely unabashed and ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... daughter of the twentieth century, and probably a feminist at heart, which is to say that her conduct was determined by no preconceived or handed-down notions of what was proper and lady-like. For feminism, in a sense, is a return to atavism, and sex antagonism and sex attraction are functions of the same thing. There were moments when she believed herself to hate Mr. Ditmar, when she treated him with an aloofness, an impersonality unsurpassed; moments when he paused in his dictation to stare at her in astonishment. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... familiar but puzzling phenomena. The fact, for instance, that certain characters often "skip a generation" is simply the effect of dominance in F1 and the reappearance of the recessive character in the following generation. "Reversion" and "atavism," again, are phenomena which are no longer mysterious, but can be simply expressed in Mendelian terms as we have already suggested in Chap. VI. The occasional appearance of a sport in a supposedly pure strain is {166} often due to the reappearance ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett |
