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hat painstaking and luminous genius to be accepted as the final expression and 

 .nterpretation of natural knowledge, deductions from which were to be regarded 

 as cogent in themselves, and proper refutations of the results of new observers. 

 If there were any approach to this state of affairs, I should offer Mr. Bateson the 

 humble tribute of my sympathy, and even if I did not agree with him, I should 

 gladly put my back against such small portion of his as it might cover. But it is 

 not so. Mr. Bateson, in girding at Darwin, is expanding his wings to the bland 

 and buoyant air of popular approval, and although I do not doubt that it is not his 

 objective, he has become an idol of the market-place. The irony of the position 

 is that those who applaud Mr. Bateson on the rumour that he is an opponent or 

 refuter of Darwin would take little comfort were they at the pains to examine for 

 themselves the direction in which Mr. Bateson would lead them. He believes 

 that the fancies of the living world came about by some evolutionary process, a 

 proposition which was first made credible by Darwin. Whether species have 

 come into existence by the summation of minute variations, a view for which 

 Darwin thought there was just a balance of evidence, and Wallace thought greatly 

 preponderating evidence, or by big jumps, as Mr. Bateson thinks, is a problem of 

 great interest and great importance, but its solution in the sense of Mr. Bateson 

 would lessen not increase the difficulties in accepting natural selection as the 

 fundamental principle of evolution. In my opinion Mr. Bateson is rash in de- 

 parting from Darwin's caution in refusing to assert that characters are useful 

 because we cannot understand their utility ; he does not allow enough for the 

 possible correlation of useless characters with useful characters, and he is going 

 far beyond the book if he thinks it a vital part of Darwin's theory to suppose that 

 every specific character is useful. But even if he were to succeed in ejecting 

 every notion of utility from our conception of the evolutionary process, his dis- 

 illusioned admirers would find themselves further than ever from Paley, further 

 from teleology, further from a mystical immanence of design. The analysis of 

 organisms into unit characters or factors, the interpretation of the phenomena of 

 variation and heredity as combinations and disintegrations of given unit factors 

 according to numerical law, would make the living world more congruous with 

 the inorganic world, and would not lighten the task of those who propose to 

 interpret it in terms of mind. 



These preliminary remarks relate rather to the attitude than to the substance 

 of Mr. Bateson's lectures, for the greater part of the volume is a luminous and 

 quite reasonably impartial account of many of the problems that are still per- 

 plexing biologists. These fortunately exist in every branch of biology ; it would 

 be a dull world if we understood it all. In his introductory chapter Mr. Bateson 

 relates the problem of species in a fashion which insists on the reality of specific 

 distinctions apart from what has been called their " selection value." He is very 

 severe on systematics, contrasting those who are "engaged in the actual work of 

 naming and cataloguing animals" with biologists. He points out that almost 

 always the collections are arranged in such a way that the phenomena of variation 

 are masked, that the causes of variation are overlooked or confused, and that it 

 is only by a minute study of the original labels of specimens and by redistributing 

 them according to locality and date that their natural relations can be traced. 

 He might have added that the modern museum system of attaching to each 

 specific name a "type" specimen duly registered and labelled, by which the 

 species must in future stand or fall, may be convenient to the systematist, but has 

 helped to divorce systematic work from any true understanding of the natural 

 facts. It is conceivable that the vast labour of systematists in museums may not 



