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SOME NEW BOOKS. 



Darwin and After Darwin. 



Darwin and After Darwin : An Exposition of the Darwinian Theory and a 

 Discussion of Post-Darwinian Questions. By the late G. J. Romanes, F.R.S. 

 II. — Post-Darwinian Questions : Heredity and Utility. Pp. x., 344. London : 

 Longmans, Green & Co., 1895. Price 10s. 6d. 



Professor Lloyd Morgan has edited tnis volume, and he tells us that 

 he has made no substantial additions, as the greater part of the book 

 had been prepared before the death of its author. The present 

 volume consists of an Introduction, a section on Heredity, and a 

 section on Utility. Isolation and Physiological Selection are reserved 

 for a third volume. 



In the Introduction, Professor Romanes distinguishes between the 

 Darwinism of Darwin, what he calls the Darwinism of Wallace, and 

 the neo-Lamarckian schools. He begins by a series of quotations, to 

 show that Darwin did not insist on the all-sufficiency of natural 

 selection, his point being to suggest that other naturalists are 

 departing from orthodox Darwinism. Now we grant his quotations 

 completely, and agree that they fully bear out the somewhat 

 unnecessary proposition that Darwin, to use his own words, believed 

 natural selection to have been " the main, but not the exclusive 

 means of modification." With the minor means of modification, from 

 use-inheritance to physiological selection, an indefinite number of 

 names are associated ; the name of Darwin has been and will be 

 associated with the origin of species by means of natural selection. 

 That was his theory: the other "causes" were mere shifting 

 accessories ; many of them accepted by Darwin, as by others, on 

 trust, and not questioned until the passing of the years and the 

 progress of knowledge threw doubt on them. 



Section 1 of this volume deals with characters as hereditary and 

 acquired. It is somewhat remarkable that Romanes himself, and his 

 editor, allowed a large part of this section to stand. Those who are 

 familiar with the controversy as to the inheritance of acquired 

 characters will remember that Romanes chose to assume that 

 Weismann made the non-inheritance of acquired characters a funda- 

 mental postulate from which to deduce his theory of the germ-plasm 

 and his theory of evolution. It has been pointed out sufficiently often 

 that Weismann did not begin by doubting the evidence of acquired 

 characters, but that his conception of the continuity of the germ-plasm 

 led him to doubt their inheritance and to examine afresh the supposed 

 evidence in its favour. However, Romanes wrote his " Examination of 

 Weismannism " on the double theory that non-inheritance was a 

 fundamental postulate and that the slightest possibility of use- 

 inheritance would be fatal to all Weismann's views. In his recently 

 published "Life and Letters" we find that Romanes read the "Germ- 

 plasm " only after he had written the " Examination of Weismannism," 

 and that he thought it " a great nuisance " to find that Weismann 

 had anticipated the points of all his longer arguments. Weismann had 

 shown, in the plainest fashion, that his views of non-inheritance were 

 inferential, not fundamental, and he had actually included the 



