THE THEORY OF DESCENT 26*7 



It is only for one special feature that I should like to 

 show, by a more full analysis, that dogmatic Darwinism 

 does not satisfy the requirements of the case. The special 

 strength of Darwinism is said to lie in its explaining every- 

 thing that is useful in and for organisms ; the competitive 

 factor it introduces does indeed seem to secure at least a 

 relative sort of adaptedness between the organism and its 

 needs. But in spite of that, we shall now see that 

 Darwinism fails absolutely to explain those most intimate 

 organic phenomena which may be said to be the most 

 useful of all. 



Darwinism in its dogmatic form is not able to explain 

 the origin of any sort of organic restitution ; it is altogether 

 impossible to account for the restitutive power of organisms 

 by the simple means of fluctuating variation and natural 

 selection in the struggle for existence. Here we have the 

 logical experimentum crucis of Darwinism. 



Let us try to study in the Darwinian style the origin 

 of the regenerative faculty, as shown in the restitution of 

 the leg of a newt. All individuals of a given species of the 

 newt, say Triton taeniatus, are endowed with this faculty ; 

 all of them therefore must have originated from ancestors 

 which acquired it at some time or other. But this 

 necessary supposition implies that all of these ancestors 

 must have lost their legs in some way, and not only one, 

 but all four of them, as they could not have acquired the 

 restitutive faculty otherwise. We are thus met at the very 

 beginning of our argument by what must be called a 

 real absurdity, which is hardly lessened by the assumption 

 that regeneration was acquired not by all four legs together, 

 but by one after the other. But it is absolutely inevit- 



