CHAPTER XIV 



GENERAL DISCUSSION 



X HE results to which this work leads being somewhat sub- 

 versive of current opinions, it wiU be well, perhaps, briefly to 

 restate parts of the argument in other words. Some of it appeared 

 eighteen years ago in Age and Area, but the propositions there 

 put forward were not accepted, though the arguments brought 

 up against them appeared to the writer to be lacking in logical 

 force, and he has remained faithful to his published opinions. 

 Bateson alone among reviewers realised that the discovery of the 

 "hollow curves" was one of importance, and the only thing that 

 opponents have been able to bring up against them is that they 

 are "accidental", just as the curve of names from the telephone 

 book, or of the names in Canton Vaud (p. 35) is "accidental", 

 which is exactly what the writer was out to prove. 



Until some eighty years ago, the appearance of the vast 

 numbers of forms of life that people the world, and that are 

 usually known as the species of animals or plants, was put down 

 to a somewhat crude intervention of the Supreme Power, which 

 was supposed to have created all the hundreds of thousands of 

 them, each species in its existing form, and to have placed each 

 in a more or less definite region, where it is still commonly to be 

 found (p. 2). When studied in more detail, however, many 

 difficulties cropped up, difficulties that became ever more insis- 

 tent, and that at last resulted in the sweeping away of the old 

 theory of special creation, then the background of biological 

 work. One great difficulty, for example, was to explain the 

 evident likenesses that one may see in the tiger, the leopard, and 

 the cat, or the daisy and the sunflower, resemblances so great 

 that they seemed to point to definite relationship, as indeed had 

 been suspected since the days of Aristotle. 



In 1859, with the appearance of the Origin of Species, there 

 began the long reign of " Darwinism ", lasting to the present time. 

 Darwin's immortal service to science was to establish the theory 

 of evolution — that every living species has been derived from 

 some other by direct descent, accompanied by such modification 

 that for example the tiger, the leopard, and the cat might all be 

 derived from a common parent sufficiently far back. Unfortu- 

 nately the name of Darwinism was popularly given rather to the 



