228 DARWINISM TO-DAY. 



the eggs for the second generation, which eggs are also deposited 

 on the leaves of both live- and white-oaks. But while the live-oak 

 is an evergreen tree, the white-oak is deciduous, and sheds its 

 leaves soon after these October eggs are laid on them, which means 

 that one-half of this second generation is doomed to die of starva- 

 tion immediately after hatching. This is repeated regularly each 

 year, and is certainly a distinctly unfit habit in this moth's life 

 economy. Plate refers to a similar instance of Unsweckmdssigkeit 

 as follows: "As I once was landing on Santa Maria Island in the 

 Gulf of Aranco, the whole shore swarmed with thousands of giant 

 cuttlefishes (Ommatastrephes gigas) which partly lay dead on the 

 beach and partly were swimming around in the shallow water. 

 These latter instead of trying to get back into deeper water, con- 

 stantly swam towards the land until a breaker threw them up high 

 and dry. Reflexes and instincts often make mistakes, that is, they 

 result in actions which result in actual harm, and nothing is more 

 mistaken than the declaration that an organism reacts under normal 

 circumstances always in a way to serve the preservation of its life. 

 That organisms under new circumstances or in abnormal condi- 

 tion very often react unfitly, requires no elaboration ; every light- 

 house against which thousands of birds and insects are killed, the 

 toxicological phenomena, the incomplete regeneration, every club- 

 foot, and every Wasserkopf prove this. The countless harmful re- 

 actions and incompletenesses in structure make it impossible to 

 speak, in the vitalistic sense, of an inherent Zweckmassigkeit of 

 organisms, of a tendency always to change in the direction of use- 

 fulness. An organism is exactly as definitely ruled by chemico- 

 physical laws as every dead body. Let an organism happen in any 

 set of conditions : it has no longer the choice among a useful, a 

 harmful, or an indifferent reaction, but the causal chain determines 

 for a definite direction and this is, as a thousandfold observations 

 show, not a life-preserving one, in other words is not sweckmassig. 

 If now in spite of this organisms have become, in the course of 

 earth-history, even more complex and more capable and have 

 acquired the most wonderful adaptation, there must obtain some 

 regulatory principle in Nature, which we, with Darwin, recognise 

 as actually existing in the struggle for existence and the con- 

 sequent selection of fit variations. If organisms actually had the 

 capacity to direct their vital activities always toward the side of 

 utility, then the workings of the natural forces would be over- 

 come and Mysticism again be introduced in natural philosophy. 

 Both actual observation and the theoretical basis of natural science 

 give no basis for any hypothesis of the existence in organisms of 

 an immanent capacity for adaptive reactions." 



