A COUNTER CRITICISM. 153 



should have gladly used in support of my argument had they 

 been available ; but unfortunately they are not. 



On the next page of the Duke of Argyll's article (page 145), 

 occurs a passage which I must quote at length before I can deal 

 effectually with its various statements.* It runs as follows : 



But if natural selection is a mere pbrase, vague enough and wide enough to 

 cover any number of the physical causes concerned in ordinary generation, then 

 the whole of Mr. Spencer's laborious argument in favor of his " other factor " 

 becomes an argument worse than superfluous. It is wholly fallacious in assum- 

 ing that this "factor" and "natural selection" are at all exclusive of, or even sep- 

 arate from, each other. The factor thus assumed to be new is simply one of the 

 subordinate cases of heredity. But heredity is the central idea of natural selec- 

 tion. Therefore natural selection includes and covers all the causes which can 

 possibly operate through inheritance. There is thus no difficulty whatever in 

 referring it to the same one factor whose solitary dominion Mr. Spencer has 

 plucked up courage to dispute. He will never succeed in shaking its dictator- 

 ship by such a small rebellion. His little contention is like some bit of Bumble- 

 dom setting up for Home Rule— some parochial vestry claiming independence of 

 a universal empire. It pretends to set up for itself in some fragment of an idea. 

 But here is not even a fragment to boast of or to stand up for. His new factor in 

 organic evolution has neither independence nor novelty. Mr. Spencer is able to 

 quote himself as having mentioned it in his Principles of Biology, published 

 some twenty years ago; and by a careful ransacking of Darwin he shows that 

 the idea was familiar to and admitted by him at least in his last edition of the 

 Origin of Species. . . . Darwin was a man so much wiser than all his follow- 

 ers, &c. 



Had there not been the Duke of Argyll's signature to the 

 article, I could scarcely have believed that this passage was 

 written by him. Remembering that on reading his article in 

 the preceding number of this Review, I was struck by the ex- 

 tent of knowledge, clearness of discrimination, and power of 

 exposition, displayed in it, I can scarcely understand how there 

 has come from the same XDen a passage in which none of these 

 traits are exhibited. Even one wholly unacquainted with the 

 subject may see in the last two sentences of the above extract, 

 how strangely its propositions are strung together. While in 

 the first of them I am represented as bringing forward a " new 

 factor," I am in the second represented as saying that I men- 

 tioned it twenty years ago ! In the same breath I am described 

 as claiming it as new and asserting it as old ! So, again, the 

 uninstructed reader, on comparing the first words of the extract 

 with the last, will be surprised on seeing in a scientific article 

 statements so manifestly wanting in precision. If " natural se- 

 lection is a mere phrase," how can Mr. Darwin, who thought it 

 explained the origin of species, be regarded as wise ? Surely it 

 must be more than a mere phrase if it is the key to so many 



* " Popular Science Monthly," vol. xxxiii, p. 58. 



