1899] A ZOOLOGIST ON THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE 425 
organic world, by no means an absolute fitness, but enough to call for 
explanation. We also admit that living individuals are capable of 
nurture. But, says our author, the nurture may be good or bad, quite 
as often the latter as the former. Therefore “the view that nature is 
inherited nurture throws no light on the problem of fitness.” Accept- 
ing the premises, and setting aside natural selection and other factors, 
we might grant that unfit modifications would so counterbalance fit 
modifications that the conclusion would follow. All turns on what is 
meant by good and bad nurture. Nurture is, broadly speaking, the 
influence of environment on the individual. Now environment can be 
called favourable or unfavourable only from a relative standpoint; that 
is, so far as the individual is or is not adapted to it. We know no 
absolute good, no ultimate morality. As Dr. Brooks elsewhere says, 
‘no natural response can be beneficial under all circumstances” ; 
education and experience (which, be it noted, are forms of nurture) 
enable organisms to distinguish the harmful from the beneficial 
occasions (p. 13). It is admitted that we start with individuals 
fairly adapted to their environment, and that change in the individual 
or the race is induced by change of environment. But it is clear that 
any change of environment breaks the harmony and must be unfavour- 
able to the individual: natural actions are beneficial only “so far as 
the environment is, on the average, like the ancestral environment” 
(p. 10). The change continues unfavourable until the individual or 
the race is modified in accordance with it; but this modification is 
itself beneficial only so long as the same change persists or continues 
in the same direction. Nurture is found to have been “ bad,’ when 
the change of environment has been only temporary or extraordinary. 
Man, subject as he is to so many and great changes of environment, is 
often led into surroundings or habits at variance with the general con- 
ditions that govern the existence of his race: these things we rightly 
call “bad.” But with other organisms and in physical nature changes 
of environment are, as a rule, secular, and proceed equably in a certain 
direction. Therefore their action on individuals is regular; in other 
words, the nurture is “good” on the whole. But if it be conceded 
that the good preponderates ever so little over the bad, the objection 
of Dr. Brooks becomes invalid. 
Other considerations advanced by our author may render the 
Lamarckian doctrine unnecessary or less probable; but I fail to see 
that they prove the inheritance of modifications to be either impossible 
or ineffectual. 
The first consideration is the truth of natural selection and its 
adequacy to account for animated nature as we see it. Most Neo- 
Lamarckians admit natural selection, though not its complete adequacy. 
But even that might be admitted without diminishing the adequacy or 
effect of any other factor. It is hardly necessary to point out that, 
under any theory of heredity and development, the rate of progress 
