1893. NATURAL SELECTION AND LAMARCKISM. 347 



If no saving can be effected in the small separate fibres that make 

 xLp muscle and nerve — if economy cannot be brought about in the 

 separate cubic inches, or ounces, or grammes, of the bodily structure, 

 how can it possibly be effected in the whole body, made up of 

 those separate inches, or ounces, or grammes ? Mr. Spencer 

 allows that Natural Selection, and, therefore, panmixia also, can act 

 upon aggregates ; and he is, therefore, logically bound to admit that 

 they can affect the minute parts of which aggregates are composed. 

 The changes are not necessarily as gradual as Mr. Spencer repre- 

 sents them. Greatly diminished, or almost aborted, eyes will 

 occasionally appear, and the possessors, no longer eliminated through 

 failure of vision, will diffuse the degenerative tendency among the 

 species by intercrossing. 



Fortunately, the question of the possibility of minute reduction 

 and minute economy in the shape and weight of organs, without the 

 aid of use-inheritance, can be settled by a simple and direct appeal to 

 facts. The advice of Solomon, that we should go to the ant to learn 

 wisdom, is pecuharly applicable to the Neo-Lamarckian. He can 

 test his arguments by an appeal to Nature herself. In neuter insects 

 we are furnished with a happy opportunity of excluding use-inheritance 

 from the problem. Now, in neuter insects, the effects assumed to be 

 impossible have actually occurred. Neuter ants of various species 

 possess eyes in all manner of grades of imperfection and smallness 

 down to the most rudimentary, and even to the complete loss of the 

 •eye, of which only a trace of the socket remains. This, like the loss 

 of wings, cannot be due to the inheritance of acquired characters, 

 since the neuters cannot transmit their acquired characters to 

 posterity, and the actual parents still retain the eyes and wings 

 necessary for the nuptial flight. What, then, is the use of elaborately 

 arguing that accomplished facts are impossible ? It is the ways and 

 works of Nature that we must study. She cares nothing for the 

 theories of philosophers and their fancied impossibilities. She calmly 

 ■does the thing declared impossible ; in neuter insects she reduces and 

 economises on the minutest scale without use-inheritance ; she neatly 

 and fitly develops, with all due co-ordination and economy, the special 

 organs of neuter insects, together with wonderful mental faculties, 

 and complex social instincts, which are never exercised, or, indeed, 

 possessed, by the parents. Why, then, should we be asked to believe 

 that, without the help of use-inheritance, minute economy and 

 complex evolution are incredible ? And what argument can possibly 

 show that processes which certainly take place in innumerable 

 species of ants, bees, termites, and wasps cannot take place in larger 

 organisms where we do not happen to possess any special means of 

 •demonstratively separating the effects of Neo-Darwinian factors from 

 those attributed to the transmission of acquired characters ? 



With reference to the arguments advanced against Weismann, I 

 may say briefly that, although the bodily, or somatic, elements which 



