1893. 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 exainina- 
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. Pratt BAtt. 
