t893. natural selection and LAMARCKISM. 349 



domestic fowl, it is also disproved by a non-shortening, or extremely 

 slight shortening, which is most conspicuous in the breeds that never 

 fly. But the Neo-Lamarckian will probably spike his own guns 

 rather than allow us to use them against him ; and we must allow him 

 to do so, if he chooses. The one thing clearly provable is the excessive 

 dubiousness of a factor which is so strangely uncertain in its action, 

 or is so weak as to be easily overruled in some of its effects by causes 

 so trivial and obscure that their interference was never suspected. 



We have seen that the theory of use-inheritance is unnecessary, 

 since Natural Selection and other non-Lamarckian factors are evi- 

 dently capable of effecting such changes as have been adduced. When 

 we further consider the many difficulties and improbabilities involved in 

 the hypothesis — the suspicious lack of satisfactory evidence — the 

 evidence to the contrary which can be drawn even from an examina- 

 tion of the details of the very cases presented as proofs — the ease with 

 which the effects of Natural Selection and panmixia are attributed to 

 use or disuse — the certainty that mutilations are not inherited even 

 when (as in the case of the hymen) they have been repeated for in- 

 numerable generations — and the extreme difficulty of accounting for 

 transmission of acquired characters except by the overwhelmingly 

 cumbrous and improbable method of pangenesis — we may well come 

 to the conclusion that the inheritance of acquired characters cannot 

 safely be admitted as a factor of evolution unless much better evidence 

 is produced than has hitherto been forthcoming ; and until such 

 proof of the Lamarckian factor is obtained, we can have no right to 

 rely upon a mere hypothesis which biologists are fast rejecting as a 

 mere figment of the human imagination. And if the growing opinion 

 of scientific men is correct, Mr. Spencer's psychology and many 

 cherished but illusive expectations of continued progress by education 

 alone will prove to be but castles built on sand, and will have to yield 

 due supremacy to selective ideals and methods corresponding with 

 the fundamental laws of evolution and of mental and moral progress 

 — a position which by no means excludes the beneficent effects of 

 education and parental influence, although it rejects the delusive and 

 mischievous belief in the alleged inheritance of the changes thus 

 produced. 



Wm. Platt Ball. 



