Note 37 — Chapter XI

It is possible to imagine an exceptional case though most unlikely that it would occur. Suppose for example that there were a number of distasteful species, say 20, all of different patterns, and suppose that in all of them a particular variation occurred simultaneously; then if the total shewing that variation from among the 20 species were greater than the number of any one of the species, all of the 20 species would come to take on the form of the new variation. In this way it is imaginable that the new pattern would gradually engulf all the old ones.