214 EVOLUTION 



have so often done. Hence a view of evolu- 

 tion essentially mechanical, in terms of the 

 division of labour, the cumulative patenting 

 and the like, which were gradually evolving 

 the express locomotives or the manufactur- 

 ing plant of Darwin's day, and now the fly- 

 ing-machine in our own. Hence, too, views 

 essentially competitive and commercial, albeit 

 of various shadings, from old-fashioned 

 individual efficiency to cheaper and cheaper 

 undersellings, with advantages here from 

 advertisements more and more brightly and 

 seductively coloured, there from deceptive 

 imitations more and more subtly wrought. 

 'Competition is the life of Trade": then 

 why not also the trade of Life? Yet with 

 all this freshness and vigour of economic 

 application, there has prevailed in the main, 

 and still prevails, a naive forgetfulness of 

 the social origins of these naturalists' dis- 

 coveries. 



Similarly in neo-Darwinian times. With 

 united and real respect for Weismann, for 

 whose work one of us has once and again 

 acted as translator and editor, the other yet 

 ventures to urge one of the very few criti- 

 cisms which that wide and fair-minded and 

 subtle thinker seems never to have consid- 

 ered : the striking social parallelism of his own 

 theory of the germ-plasm, of the ovum's 



