112 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



which must be added the effects of hereditary endowment from a long 

 line of ancestors occupying other and changing environments, to all 

 of which these ancestors must have been structurally adapted. The 

 word " environment " is a term of the most comprehensive kind, em- 

 bodying, in every case that it is used, an assemblage of conditions pre- 

 senting an amount of complexity that is not only inconceivable but 

 wholly unnamable. It is nothing less than amazing to- find a man at 

 this time of day seeking to argue that environments can not " be the 

 cause of the diversifications of species," on such grounds as that differ- 

 ent species flourish in " parts of South Africa and Australia which are 

 wonderfully similar in their soil and climate." Indeed, not to prolong 

 the discussion of nonsense, I will conclude this part of my reply by 

 quoting the sentence with which he concludes his statement of this 

 particular " fallacy of evolution." I do so because, while he appears 

 to think that the question is of so unanswerable a character as to de- 

 serve the place of anti-climax in his argument, it really presents as 

 good an example as could anywhere be found of misconceiDtion blatant. 

 Here it is : " And then, what is to be said for the multitude of species 

 to be found in the same localities, the same forests, the same jungles, 

 the same lakes, the same streamlets, where there is literally no room 

 for any difference in the environments at all ? " 



After an exj^ose of ignorance so crass I do not think that I should 

 be performing any useful function by following the writer any further 

 in his luckless flounderings. The rest of his article consists in a trite 

 statement of the facts that species are not producible by artificial 

 selection, and that some specific forms have remained unchanged 

 through long geological epochs — neither of which facts has the small- 

 est tendency to negative the doctrine of descent. 



He also devotes a page or two to sustain the theory that the lake- 

 dwellers and other prehistoric men were the " degraded descendants 

 of a civilized ancestry." Of course, in so doing he has no facts to 

 adduce — merely maintaining that " it is just as possible, just as likely, 

 that the artificers in stone, and the dwellers in the caves of the earth, 

 were the degraded descendants of a civilized ancestry, as the barba- 

 rous ancestors of a civilized posterity " — forgetting, on the one hand, 

 that, if the general theory of evolution be true, this is not so possible 

 or oiot so likely ; and, on the other hand, that it is a very unfortunate 

 fact for the possibility and the likelihood in question that the " civil- 

 ized ancestry " should have been so much less fortunate in leaving 

 behind them relics of their existence than have been their " barbarous 

 posterity," Next, he treats of "the distinction and equable distribu- 

 tion of the sexes." This is, indeed, a subject which the theory of 

 evolution has not yet been successful in completely explaining ; but 

 our author, by again displaying his ignorance of Mr. Darwin's writ- 

 ings, has not made so strong a case as he might have made. He ap- 

 pears to think it self-evident that over such things " the struggle for 



