Appendix II. 315 



and therefore I do not see that he gains much by apparently 

 seeking to add this further meaning viz. that in Darwin's 

 opinion there must have been some unassignable reason 

 preventing the occurrence of useless specific characters in 

 cases where species are not destined to become the parents 

 of genera. 



Moreover, any such meaning is out of accordance with 

 the context from which the passage is taken. For, after 

 a long consideration of the question of utility, Darwin sums 

 up, "We thus see that with plants many morphological 

 changes may be attributed to the laws of growth and the 

 interaction of parts, independently of natural selection" And 

 then he adds, " From the fact of the above characters being 

 unimportant for the welfare of the species, any slight variations 

 which occurred in them would not have been augmented 

 through natural selection? Again, still within the same 

 passage, he says, while alluding to the causes other than 

 natural selection which lead to changes of specific characters, 

 "If the unknown cause were to act almost uniformly for 

 a length of time, we may infer that the result would be 

 almost uniform ; and in this case all the individuals of the 

 species would be modified in the same manner." For my 

 own part I do not understand how Mr. Wallace can have 

 overlooked these various references to species, all of which 

 occur on the very page from which he is quoting. The 

 whole argument is to show that " many morphological 

 changes may be attributed to the laws of growth and the 

 inter-action of parts [plus external conditions of life], 

 independently of natural selection " ; that such non-adaptive 

 changes, when they occur as " specific characters," may, if 

 the species should afterwards give rise to genera, families, 

 &c., become distinctive of these higher divisions. But there 

 is nothing here, or in any other part of Darwin's writings, 

 to countenance the inconsistent notion which Mr. Wallace 

 appears to entertain, viz. that species which present useless 



