ADAPTATION 189 



that it does. Belief in these transmissions, after being almost 

 universally held, was with singular unanimity abandoned. This 

 change in opinion, though doing credit to the faith of the scientific 

 community in evidential reasoning, is the more remarkable 

 inasmuch as the strength of the idea was not derived from the 

 minute amounts of supposed facts now demolished. On the 

 contrary, it was really an instinctive deduction from a wide 

 superficial acquaintance with the properties of animals and 

 plants. They can accommodate themselves to circumstances. 

 They do make responses sometimes marvellously appropriate 

 to demands for which they can scarcely have been prepared. 

 What more natural than to suppose that the permanent adapta- 

 tions have been achieved by inherited summation of such re- 

 sponses? No one had actually been driven to believe in the 

 inheritance of adaptative changes because bitches which had 

 been docked had been known to give birth to tailless puppies, 

 or because certain wheat in Norway was alleged to have become 

 acclimatized in a few generations. Evidence of this kind was 

 collected and produced rather as an ornamental appendix to a 

 proposition already accepted, and held to be plainly demon- 

 strated by the facts of nature. Looked at indeed in that pre- 

 liminary and uncritical way, the case is simply overwhelming. 

 Those who desire to see how strong it is should turn to Samuel 

 Butler's Life and Habit, and even if in reading they reiterate to 

 themselves that no experimental evidence exists in support of 

 the propositions advanced, the misgiving that none the less they 

 may be true is likely to remain. Making every deduction for 

 the fact that the wonders of adaptation have been grossly ex- 

 aggerated, and that marvels of fitness and correspondence be- 

 tween means and ends have grown out of mere anthropomorphic 

 speculations, there is much more left to be accounted for than 

 can at all comfortably be accepted as the product of happy 

 accidents. So oppressive are these difficulties that we can scarcely 

 blame those who imagine that the study of heredity is primarily 

 directed to the problem of the transmission of acquired characters, 

 a preconception still almost universal among the laity. 



But since the belief in transmission of acquired adaptations 



