"Atavism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... received by scornful cries and groans. He did not like it, for his sullen mouth twisted into a half-snarl as he went back to his corner. He was too decided an atavism to draw the crowd's admiration. Instinctively the crowd disliked him. He was an animal, lacking in intelligence and spirit, a menace and a thing of fear, as the tiger and the snake are menaces and things of fear, better ...
— The Game • Jack London
... reverse of the sport. Instead of jumping long distance ahead, an individual may lapse back towards the primitive. That individual is called an atavism. For instance, in this mountain-desert there has, for several generations, been a pressure of environment calling for a species of man which will be able to live with comparative comfort in a waste region—a man, in a word, equipped with such powerful organisms ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... a Norman, and, according to those who knew him best, many of his traits of character show that atavism is not always ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... could exact anything of the Mameluke, or, rather, of that slave, for it was the blood of the slaves, of his ancestors, which manifested itself in Chapron by so total an absorption of his personality. The atavism of servitude has these two effects which are apparently contradictory: it produces fathomless capacities of sacrifice or of perfidy. Both of these qualities were embodied in the brother and in the sister. As happens, sometimes, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... criminal classes. The language of the Stock Exchange with its Bulls, Bears, Contangos, and other short and comprehensive expressions for various kinds of stocks, is on all fours with the slang of criminals, and it is not necessary to resort to atavism in order to explain it. It arises to supply professional needs, and criminal argot springs up from exactly the ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... followed the servant into the house there came a swift remembrance of those lamentable presentiments. Was there, after all, something in the blood akin to the prescience through which birds and wild things scent the coming storms?—some atavism outgrown by the people of intellectual advancement, but yet a power to the ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... 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, ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... a new chord, extracting from the 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 ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... High German (i.e., not a Hollander) doctor, who had a reputation as a sorcerer or wizard. He was a man of learning, but that is all I ever heard about him. My mother's opinion was that this was a very strong case of atavism, and that the mysterious ancestor had through the ages cropped out again in me. Something tells me that this was the High German doctor who, according to Washington Irving, laid the mystic spell on Sleepy Hollow, which made of it such a pleasant, ancient, dreamy ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... belong predominantly to the reproductive motive. It is because, at least, all deep tendencies of life are involved in war that it is so hard to eliminate it from experience. If war were an instinctive reaction it might be controlled by reason. If it were an atavism or a rudimentary organ some social surgery or other might relieve us of it. But war is a product of man's idealism, misdirected and impracticable idealism though it may be, but still something very expressive of what man is. It is this idealism of nations, ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... 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 voice; they caused tumult in the streets, ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... It should be said that there is a considerable family of Campells or Campbells in the Graubuenden, who are fabled to deduce their stock from a Scotch Protestant of Zwingli's time; and this made it irresistible to imagine that in our friend Bernardo I had chanced upon a notable specimen of atavism. All he knew, however, was, that his first ancestor had been a foreigner, who came across the mountains ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... genius enabled him to see and to show what he saw to others; his memory neither forgot nor forgave. Very hateful to his fervid heart and sincere mind would have been the modern theory which deals with sin as involuntary error, and by shifting off the fault to the shoulders of Atavism or those of Society, personified for purposes of excuse, but escaping into impersonality again from the grasp of retribution, weakens that sense of personal responsibility which is the root of self-respect and the safeguard of character. Dante indeed saw clearly ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... 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 ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... you are a case of atavism, no doubt. If I were as good a poet as one of my brother columnists I should have written a poem to you long since. I can see you sweeping northward over the steppes of Russia as the ice-caps retreated . . . reembodied on the Baltic coast or the shores of the North Sea . . . sleeping ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 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 ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... a rational basis for some 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 ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... rise to a bud having an intermediate character. We have seen that variability does not depend on sexual generation, though much more frequently its concomitant than of bud reproduction. We have seen that bud-variability is not solely dependent on reversion or atavism to long-lost characters, or to those formerly acquired from a cross, but appears often to be spontaneous. But when we ask ourselves what is the cause of any particular bud-variation, we are lost in doubt, being driven in some cases ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... of reproduction appears to be the principle underlying longevity. There does not appear at first sight to be much connection between such distinct and apparently disconnected phenomena as 1, the orderly normal progress of development; 2, atavism and the resumption of feral characteristics; 3, the more ordinary resemblance inter se of nearer relatives; 4, the benefit of an occasional cross, and the usual sterility of hybrids; 5, the unconsciousness with which alike bodily development and ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... 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 which they naturally inherited. No man can be expected ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... such as it is, 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 moral in a tract; never ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... struggle. Primitive woman, proud of her womanhood, for a long time defended her nakedness which ancient art has always represented. And in the actual life of the young girl to-day there is a moment when, by a secret atavism, she feels the pride of her sex, the intuition of her moral superiority, and cannot understand why she must hide its cause. At this moment, wavering between the laws of Nature and social conventions, she scarcely knows if nakedness should or should not affright her. A sort of confused ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... awkward pause. Coke, rascal though he was, and pot-bellied withal, was no Falstaff. Rather did he suggest the present-day atavism of some robber baron of the Middle Ages, whose hectoring speech bubbled forth from a stout heart. But the ragged ex-President heeded him not. After a moment of placid scrutiny of his enraged countenance by those bright, watchful eyes, Coke might have been non-existent so far as recognition ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... it 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, ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... 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, ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... crime of accusing an innocent person. The love of Phedre is excusable on account of the fatality which hangs over her family and descends pitilessly upon her. In our times we should call that fatality atavism, for Phedre was the daughter of Minos and Pasiphae. As to Theseus, his verdict, against which there could be no appeal, was an arbitrary and monstrous act, and was punished by the death of that beloved son of his, who was the sole and last hope of his life. We ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... returnings! So strong is the love idea in him, that it has suscitated all that is inherent and essential in the character. It sent him to Boulogne so that he might fight a duel; and the other day a nun left her convent for him. Curious atavism, curious recrudescence of a dead idea of man! Say, is it his fault if his pleasures are limited to clandestine visits; his fame to a summons to appear in a divorce case; his danger to that most pitiful of modern ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... 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 will break through ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... 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. It—it was the ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple |
