178 DARWINISM TO-DAY. 



man can make a beginning with ever so slight an advance ; 

 nature only with such simultaneous changes as are of suffi- 

 cient grade or degree to be. of selective value. And so far 

 in this discussion nothing has been offered to show how this 

 condition is to be reached." 



To attempt to get at an explanation of the actual means 

 by which this necessary condition is attained, Plate believes it 

 Plate's belief necessary that one should make clear just what 

 in the possibility standpoint he takes on the vexed problem of 

 tance of acquired the inheritance of acquired characters. With- 

 characters, Oll t going into Plate's long discussion of this old 

 subject, it is sufficient to say that he reaches the conclusion 

 that the inheritance of acquired characters is not proved 

 not to be possible, and hence that it may occur. And, for 

 himself, he expresses the belief that acquired somatic char- 

 acters can be and are inherited. From this point of view, he, 

 consistently with Darwin's own position, finds an answer to 

 the objection touching the necessity of a repetitive cumulat- 

 ing appearance of certain definite kinds of variation for the 

 basis of the development of coadaptation, by invoking the 

 Lamarckian factor of the inheritance of the effects of use 

 and functional stimuli. Which refuge is of course not open 

 to the modern strict selectionists, the neo-Darwinians. 



Now, as may be imagined, when the Darwinians them- 

 selves are of various minds about the value of the answers 

 to this objection, when these answers are based on a strict 

 selection basis, they are not very convincing to anti-Darwin- 

 ians. In general they rest on various observed facts and 

 deduced assumptions which may be roughly classified into 

 several groups. First, the facts of simultaneous correlative 

 variation, or the fact that organs or parts which function 

 together, very often vary in the same general direction. For 

 example, if two leg or arm bones become longer the muscles 

 attaching to these bones also become longer (since the 

 attachments are not changed). The supplying blood-vessels 



