298 NATURAL SCIENCE. May, 



modern way." "In the recoil from the old-time methods, the college 

 has gone to the other extreme and seeks to become a place of 

 research." " Raw young men and women, after a year or two of the 

 study of ' types,' are assigned original problems, and their uncertain 

 results, with more or less revision on the part of the instructor, are 

 published in some periodical or bulletin." These remarks are worth 

 the attention of all teachers of the science, whose first aim should be 

 to give their students a thorough groundwork in general principles, 

 suppressing, if need be, undue haste towards detailed specialising in 

 any one direction. A man or woman with a good general knowledge 

 will make, for instance, a better systematist than one who has 

 acquired, at the expense of the former, detailed information in one 

 group of plants. 



The science of botany is too vast for a year or two's work 

 to be sufficient preparation for creditable research in any one branch. 

 " The different departments of it are so interdependent that it needs 

 long training to bring the perspective and the grasp that make any 

 independent investigation profitable." 



The warning, of course, applies to other Sciences besides Botany, 

 and may not be wholly unneeded in our own country. 



Mr. Wallace on Organic Evolution. 



In the Fortnightly Review for February and March, Mr. A. R. 

 Wallace deals with the views of Bateson and Galton. His essays 

 form a closely-reasoned and interesting statement of the case for 

 Natural Selection as against positions of organic stability. He urges 

 that Mr. Bateson has not been directing attention to a class of facts 

 hitherto neglected by Darwinians. Darwin himself considered with 

 great care the kind of variations that Bateson calls discontinuous, 

 and came to the conclusion that they had little or no effect on the 

 origin of species. For the most part they are sports or abnormalities, 

 and grade into monstrosities. Mr. Wallace points out that Mr. Bateson 

 is quite wrong in saying that discontinuous variations are similar to 

 the characters used to define species and genera. Systematists know 

 well that " among the higher animals, at all events, it is not so." As 

 a matter of fact, specific characters, and, indeed, generic characters, 

 in the vast majority of cases, both among higher and lower animals, 

 are of a kind similar to individual and continuous variations. 



Galton and Bateson have " devoted themselves too exclusively to 

 one set of factors, while overlooking others which are both more 

 general and more fundamental. These are the enormously rapid 

 multiplication of all organisms during more favourable periods, and 

 the consequent weeding out of all but the fittest in what must be 

 on the whole stationary populations. And acting in combination 

 with this annual destruction of the less fit is the periodical elimination 

 under recurrent unfavourable conditions of such a large proportion of 



