WITH DARWIN FORWARDS 225 



that the light saturating through the semi-trans- 

 parent tissues of the parent might directly affect the 

 germ-cells within. We attach importance to the fact 

 that Professor MacBride, one of our foremost 

 zoologists, has been definitely convinced that 

 Kammerer has proved that acquired qualities are 

 to some extent transmitted; but in view of what 

 has happened before, we decline to hurry back to 

 Lamarck. 



Failing, then, to be convinced that the proposi- 

 tion of Lamarck has been in any case proved, we 

 return in the meantime to the Darwinian theory 

 that the natural selection of variations has been a 

 vera causa in evolution. But what we return to is 

 not the theory often unjustly treated in summary 

 statement, e.g. : " The evidently-true doctrine of 

 the destruction of the less viable was held to explain 

 the origin of the more viable." For Darwin 

 made it quite clear that he postulated the raw 

 material that was continually supplied to the 

 sifting process, and it is only a little farther than 

 postulating that we can go to-day when we inquire 

 into the origin of intrinsic variations and mutations. 

 We may point to certain variational stimuli which 

 are known to provoke germinal change, and to the 

 familiar opportunities which the ripening and the 

 fertilization of the germ-cells offer for re-shufflings 

 of the hereditary cards; but when we probe into 

 the origin of the distinctively new it is difficult at 

 present to get away from the postulate that the 

 implicit organism which we call the germ-cell makes 



