368 Beard, Heredity and the cause of variations. 



those of the original sets there be any unsuitable ones these are 

 rejected. The union of two sets of characters at conjiigation is 

 in animals retained by the germ-cellsj until the period of the re- 

 duction, by the embryonic cell, until the commencement of its 

 development, when it becomes latent, and in plants during the 

 whole life-period of the flowering plant. The two sets cannot be 

 identical at the start. As living entities they must be influenced 

 by the total environment, nutrition, climate, disease, toxins, etc. 

 To all these influences they will react. The effect of all the 

 factors will be a different one on the differently constitiited cha- 

 racters. Some it will favour, and these will flourish and increase 

 in import. Others will be unfavourably influenced or negiected, 

 and these will diminish. At the reduction there will be a settling- 

 up, and if the environment have not been a constant one, some 

 of the characters will have become better than other corresponding 

 ones, a new pack will be chosen, and the less favourable cha- 

 racters will be rejected. Tliis elimination of characters may on 

 occasion become an elimination of complete individualities, or what 

 is the same thing as a casting out of „ancestors". Moreover, be- 

 cause the two sets have been conjoined under the influences 

 of the environment, and have reacted to this, the process be- 

 comes a self-adjusting mechanism, the up and down oscülations 

 of the characters of the two sets endeavouring to follow and com- 

 pensate the changes in the environment, and the result must be 

 genetic Variation. This process may be defined as germinal election 

 and elimination in adaptation to the environment. The Darwinian 

 Theory is undoubtedly largely based upon the analogy of artificial 

 selection. Nature is supposed by natural selection, resulting from 

 the struggle for existence, to eliminate all the unsuitable indi- 

 viduals, and thereby to select those for the continuance of the 

 race, which are most or more suitable for the environment. Even 

 if she did this, its results would be as nothing compared with 

 those of germinal election and elimination of unsuitable characters, 

 which at its basis is also a weeding-out of unsuitable individualities. 

 A selection of individuals can give no certain result for either 

 natural or artificial selection. Nature goes to the root of the matter, 

 she makes no selection of individuals, for about these she cares 

 nothing. She can exert her choice, and she does it, among the 

 germ-cells, and not merely in these, but among the characters or 

 qualities the germ-cells possess. In this it would be futile to 

 attempt to bind her down by cast-iron laws of inheritance, to 

 dictate that „the average contribution" of a father should be so 

 much, of a grandfather so much, and so on. This may hold good 

 in cases, but only with a constant environment. When the latter 

 obtain, if all the characters or qualities be equally good, then, as 

 in the Mendelian experiments in inter-crossing peas, the election 

 and elimination may be left to the mathematical laws of probabil- 

 ity; they may be taken apparently at random, and in this way it 

 may become possible to speak of sexual reproduction as sometimes 



