IMPORTANCE OF PRECOCITY IN EVOLUTION 323 



high, mainly between Spencer and Weismann, it would perhaps have attracted 

 some notice and been made the subject of discussion ; but much has happened 

 since then to draw public attention away from such matters, and the present 

 century apparently cares for them but little. Yet the problem whether the 

 effects of the environment upon the organism are accumulated in successive 

 generations, and how, is as important as ever before. 



In some quarters I have been told that there is nothing new in the ideas 

 here set forth, but to that statement I demur. For had it ever been realised 

 that every acquired character, or in Spencer's more accurate language, every 

 functionally produced modification, once fairly established, inevitably tends 

 to travel backwards in the ontogeny, becoming in each generation less and 

 less an adaptation to the forces of the environment, and more and more a 

 " natural " character, until it is acquired early in life as the common birth- 

 right of the whole species — the moment this was realised, the controversy 

 on the inheritance of acquired characters must forthwith have dropped. For 

 it follows that an acquired character, be it ever so adaptive in origin, once it 

 has travelled far enough back in the ontogeny to be acquired without any 

 exercise or effort at all, is inherited just as much or as little as, and in fact 

 has become, an innate or congenital character. But so far as I know, though 

 controversy on the subject is dormant, the question is considered an open 

 one to this day. So recently as the 14th of March last the Scientific Corre- 

 spondent of The Times, in an Article headed, " Are Variations Directed ? " 

 put the problem in this way : " Certainly there has been a great increase of 

 knowledge as to the part played by the environment in moulding each indi- 

 divual life, but as yet neither observation nor experiment has afforded any 

 but the faintest suggestions that these effects on the individual can be transmitted 

 to progeny in such fashion that they will reappear with a smaller contribution 

 from the environment " (my italics). This then is the still open problem, and 

 the solution, if I am not mistaken, is contained in what I have written above : 

 namely, that though the impress of the environment is not transmitted from 

 parent to offspring, yet it does reappear in them " with a smaller contribution 

 from the environment," because it is developed by each generation in succession 

 in a shorter time. Hence arises, wherever the environment, as is usual, is 

 relatively stable, that continuity of variations upon the same line through 

 many generations, which for example has been so conspicuous in the evolution 

 of the horse. 



These views may, I fear, not be everywhere welcome at present. The 

 ofi&cial scientific creed of the day is of course Mutation, and has been so for 

 many years. In a paper such as this it would be absurd to attempt the 

 refutation of a theory so widely held, but it is easy to set down a few of 

 the more obvious respects in which Precession seems to fit in far better 

 with the scheme of Nature. 



In the first place, it is not, be it said, that there are no mutations — the 

 Nectarine is a fact. Nor need I argue that no new species ever arose by 

 mutation of an old one — ^the Nectarine, for all I know, may be entitled to 

 specific rank. But it is that this has not been the way of Nature in the 

 evolution of the higher animals, or in particular of man. 



To touch on the wider aspect of the matter, it seems to me that ever 

 since the brain of man, already for long ages his chief weapon in the struggle 

 for hfe, first began among the ancient Greeks to open to the light of abstract 

 reason, three closely connected truths (among others) have ever been im- 

 pressing themselves deeper and deeper on liis mind : 



First, the instability of things — the fact that the whole universe is in 

 constant motion and consequently undergoing constant change ; the doctrine 

 so pithily expressed by Heracleitus in the two words " Panta rhei." 



Secondly, the vast importance of the little, both in matter and in force. 

 Not only on the material side is the truth that many a little makes a muckle 



