xcellence of
body to survive his foe.

The field of competition has thus been transferred from matter to mind,
but the fight has lost none of its keenness in consequence. With the
same zeal with which advantageous anatomical variations were seized upon
and perpetuated, psychical ones are now grasped and rendered hereditary.
Now if opposites were to fancy and wed one another, such fortunate
improvements would soon be lost. They would be scattered over the
community at large even it they escaped entire neutralization. To
prevent so disastrous a result nature implants a desire for resemblance,
which desire man instinctively acts upon.

Complete compatibility of temperament is of course a thing not to be
expected nor indeed to be desired, since it would defeat its own end
by allowing no room for variation. A fairly broad basis of agreement,
however, exists even when least suspected. This common ground of content
consists of those qualities held to be most essential by the individuals
concerned, although not necessarily so appearing to other people.
Sometimes, indeed, these qualities are still in the larvae state of
desires. They are none the less potent upon the man's personality on
that account, for the wish is always father to its own fulfilment.

The want of conjugal resemblance not only works mediately on the
child, it works mutually on the parents; for companionship, as is well
recognized, tends to similarity. Now companionship is the last thing to
be looked for in a far-eastern couple. Where custom requires a wife to
follow dutifully in the wake of her husband, whenever the two go out
together, there is small opportunity for intercourse by the way, even
were there the slightest inclination to it, which there is not.
The appearance of the pair on an excursion is a walking satire on
sociability, for the comicality of the connection is quite unperceived
by the performers. In the privacy of the domestic circle the separation,
if less humorous, is no less complete. Each lives in a world of his own,
largely separate in fact in China and Korea, and none the less in fancy
in Japan. On the continent a friend of the husband would see little or
nothing of the wife, and even in Japan he would meet her much as we meet
an upper servant in a friend's house. Such a semi-attached relationship
does not conduce to much mutual understanding.

The remainder of our hero's uneventful existence calls for no particular
comment. As soon as