our, the figure,
the capacities, and instincts; those individuals in each species whose
colour and covering are best suited to concealment or protection from
enemies, or defence from inclemencies and vicissitudes of climate, whose
figure is best accommodated to health, strength, defence, and support;
whose capacities and instincts can best regulate the physical energies
to self-advantage according to circumstances--in such immense waste of
primary and youthful life those only come forward to maturity from the
strict ordeal by which nature tests their adaptation to her standard of
perfection and fitness to continue their kind by reproduction.

"From the unremitting operation of this law acting in concert with the
tendency which the progeny have to take the more particular qualities of
the parents, together with the connected sexual system in vegetables and
instinctive limitation to its own kind in animals, a considerable
uniformity of figure, colour, and character is induced constituting
species; the breed gradually acquiring the very best possible adaptation
of these to its condition which it is susceptible of, and when
alteration of circumstance occurs, thus changing in character to suit
these, as far as its nature is susceptible of change.

"This circumstance-adaptive law operating upon the slight but continued
natural disposition to sport in the progeny (seedling variety) _does not
preclude the supposed influence which volition or sensation may have had
over the configuration of the body_. To examine into the disposition to
sport in the progeny, even when there is only one parent as in many
vegetables, and to investigate how much variation is modified by the
mind or nervous sensation of the parents, or of the living thing itself
during its progress to maturity; how far it depends upon external
circumstance, and how far on the will, irritability, and muscular
exertion, is open to examination and experiment. In the first place, we
ought to examine its dependency upon the preceding links of the
particular chain of life, variety being often merely types or
approximations of former parentage; thence the variation of the family
as well as of the individual must be embraced by our experiments.

"This continuation of family type, not broken by casual particular
aberration, is mental as well as corporeal, and is exemplified in many
of the dispositions or instincts of particular races of men. _These
innate or continuous idea