G ALTON AND STATISTICAL STUDY OF INHERITANCE 



nescent individuals, we cannot wonder at the vitality of the 

 belief that specific types of life are more real than the individual 

 animals, although Darwin's work has done away with whatever 

 evidence may at one time have seemed to support this belief. 



To the further question, whether specific types are inherent in 

 living matter or external and objective to it, Darwin answers that 

 they are both ; that they are inherent, insomuch as all their data, 

 or "events," are properties of the physical basis of life; but that 

 they are external, inasmuch as the agreement of the " events " 

 with the " law of frequency of error " is the effect of the 

 environment. 



Biology is not a closed science, and Darwin's view of the mat- 

 ter is not proved possibly it is not provable; but its great value 

 is in the proof that there is no shadow of evidence for any other 

 view. 



When embryologists talk about the doctrine of evolution in 

 embryology as antagonistic to the doctrine of epigenesis ; when 

 biologists seek for the origin of species in " laws of variation " 

 which are not the outcome of selection ; when they talk about a 

 "principle of organic stability" which does not owe its origin to 

 the same agency, it seems to me that they fail to grasp the sig- 

 nificance of Darwin's work, and that they are wandering from the 

 only path in which we can have any well-grounded hope for prog- 

 ress the path which takes its departure from that conception 

 of specific types which leads us to seek for the origin of the 

 "events" which exhibit the type in the physical properties of 

 living matter, and to seek in the order of nature external to the 

 organism for the origin of the "law of error," which forms a 

 type out of these events. 



