HEREDITY AND VARIATION IN MODERN LIGHTS 



BY W. BATESON, M.A., F.R.S. 



Professor of Biology in the University of Cambridge. 



DARWIN'S work has the property of greatness in that it may be 

 admired from more aspects than one. For some the perception of 

 the principle of Natural Selection stands out as his most wonderful 

 achievement to which all the rest is subordinate. Others, among 

 whom I would range myself, look up to him rather as the first who 

 plainly distinguished, collected, and comprehensively studied that 

 new class of evidence from which hereafter a true understanding of 

 the process of Evolution may be developed. We each prefer our 

 own standpoint of admiration ; but I think that it will be in their 

 wider aspect that his labours will most command the veneration of 

 posterity. 



A treatise written to advance knowledge may be read in two 

 moods. The reader may keep his mind passive, willing merely to 

 receive the impress of the writer's thought ; or he may read with his 

 attention strained and alert, asking at every instant how the new know- 

 ledge can be used in a further advance, watching continually for 

 fresh footholds by which to climb higher still. Of Shelley it has been 

 said that he was a poet for poets : so Darwin was a naturalist for 

 naturalists. It is when his writings are used in the critical and more 

 exacting spirit with which we test the outfit for our own enterprise 

 that we learn their full value and strength. Whether we glance back 

 and compare his performance with the efforts of his predecessors, or 

 look forward along the course which modern research is disclosing, we 

 shall honour most in him not the rounded merit of finite accomplish- 

 ment, but the creative power by which he inaugurated a line of 

 discovery endless in variety and extension. Let us attempt thus to 

 see his work in true perspective between the past from which it grew, 

 and the present which is its consequence. Darwin attacked the 

 problem of Evolution by reference to facts of three classes : Varia- 



