394 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



their race has long been placed, and hence tJirough the influence 

 of the predominant use or permanent disuse of any organ — all 

 these are preserved by reproduction to the new individuals which 

 arise. 



The influence of Lamarck's views on Continental believers 

 in the doctrine of evolution, or as they termed it" transformism," 

 was very great. In England it was, of course, completely over- 

 shadowed by the doctrine of " natural selection " propounded 

 by Darwin in 1859. But Darwin did not deny that the effects 

 of use and disuse were inheritable. In the 6th and last edition 

 of the Origin of Species, we find that he attributed to the in- 

 herited effects of disuse the diminution in size of the wings of 

 flightless birds, and the reduction and final disappearance of the 

 eyes in cave animals. The theory of natural selection, however, 

 postulated an indefinite variability in all the organs of all 

 animals ; and it postulated, further, that these deviations from the 

 mean could be inherited. But it did more than this, for it 

 implicitly assumed that, if one of these deviations were selected 

 for propagation, the offspring of this exceptional individual 

 would deviate in all directions from the mean represented by 

 the characters of their immediate parent, not from the mean 

 represented by the characters of the grandparent. If these 

 assumptions were justified, it followed that any supposed 

 inheritance of the effects of use was completely superfluous, 

 for any amount of deviation from the mean might result from 

 the continual selection, in the struggle for existence, of those 

 individuals which showed a beneficial variation in the highest 

 degree. 



If, however, we were to assume that the effects of disuse 

 were to be accounted for in the same way, we should be 

 committed, as Darwin clearly saw, to the difficult and doubtful 

 position that the reduction in size of a useless organ was such 

 an advantage in the struggle for life as to determine the 

 survival of its possessor. Therefore Darwin conceded the 

 principle underlying Lamarck's theory, but regarded it only as 

 one of the factors leading to variation, and therefore evolution. 



Much the same position was taken up by Haeckel, the 

 doughty protagonist for Darwin's views. In the History of 

 Creation (vol. i, 2nd edition, 1876) we read : 



" The gardener as well as the farmer avails himself of the 

 fact of Inheritance in its widest form, and indeed with special 

 regard to the fact that not only those qualities of organisms are 

 transmitted by inheritance which they have inherited from their 

 parents, but also those which they themselves have acquired. An 

 organism can transmit to its descendant, not only those quali- 

 ties of form, colour, and size which it has inherited from its 

 parents, but it can also transmit changes of these qualities 



