CHAPTER III.
ORGANIC STABILITY.
Incipient Structure.—Filial relation.—Stable Forms.—Subordinate posi¬
tions of Stability.—Model.—Stability of Sports.—Infertility of mixed
Types.—Evolution not by minute steps only.
Incipient Structure.—The total heritage of each man
must include a greater variety of material than was
utilised informing his personal structure. The existence
in some latent form of an unused portion is proved by
his power, already alluded to, of transmitting ancestral
characters that he did not personally exhibit. There¬
fore the organised structure of each individual should be
viewed as the fulfilment of only one out of an indefinite
number of mutually exclusive possibilities. His struc¬
ture is the coherent and more or less stable development
of what is no more than an imperfect sample of a large
variety of elements.
The precise conditions under which each several
element or particle (whatever may be its nature) finds
its way into the sample are, it is needless to repeat,
unknown, but we may provisionally classify them under
one or other of the following three categories, as they