314 NATURAL SCIENCE [November 
therefore haphazard, variations of the organism ; and the Almighty 
Natural Selection now steps in, weeds out the unfittest, and so 
induces the endless variety of form and function. in the Organic 
Realm. This has been irreverently termed the ‘toss-up’ or ‘dice-box’ 
theory of variation. It is hard to see how variations in feeding or 
starving hypothetical determinants can have ever ended in the 
development of a vertebrate eye, or in the exquisitely co-operating 
organs that render possible the parasitism of the offspring on the 
viviparous mother: it would be difficult if we had limitless aeons of 
biological time at our disposal, instead of the paltry million of 
centuries conceded as an outside limit by Lord Kelvin, even when 
multiplied by 4000, as Perry and Poulton suggest. We have all 
heard of the German astronomer who was reading Lucretius, and 
said to himself as noontide approached, “ So if the atoms had been 
flying about for all time, cold potato, oil, vinegar, garlic, and salt 
might have combined to form a salad.” “ Yes, dear,” said his wife, 
who had come in unperceived to call him to dinner, “but not as 
good as you shall have with your beef.” 
It must be admitted that marvellous ingenuity is shown in giving 
explanations on this theory to cases where they are not needed; we 
may cite the limitations of propagation by small fragments of 
Animals or Plants, and the variations in the power of leaf propaga- 
tion in the latter, which are so readily explicable without the germ- 
plasm hypothesis. On this hypothesis, however, we are asked to 
overlook the plain and obvious questions of nutrition, cork-formation, 
and bud-formation, and to concentrate our ideas on the presence of 
more or less dormant germ-plasm in the tissue-cells. We may well 
note here that among “ Inductive Fallacies ” Bain cites the error of 
assigning more causes than a phenomenon needs. “It is involved 
in the very idea of cause that the effect is in exact accordance with 
the cause ; hence the proof that more causes were operative than the 
effect needs defeats itself.” 
But the cardinal defect in the theory is its objective base- 
lessness. It professes to be founded on the microscopic study 
of the changes in the nucleus in cell-division; but there we 
find nothing to justify the assumption of two modes of nuclear 
division in the embryo, the one dividing the determinants, and 
the other only distributing them between the daughter-cells. To 
justify such a theory there should at least be some such basis in 
fact, as indeed there is for the author’s ‘id’ theory of the relations 
of ‘amphigonic’ inheritance (from two parents),? which does not 
1 “Logic,” by Alexander Bain. Part II., Induction, ed. 2, 1873, p. 395. 
? To avoid complication and the undue lengthening of this essay we have been 
obliged to omit the consideration of the effect of double parentage in the higher 
organisms that reproduce sexually. But it is obvious that of itself it must tend to efface 
and not to accentuate the variations from the average standard of the race. 
