II. 



Characters in Biology. 



IN a recent controversy as to the Factors of Organic Evolution, as 

 well as in other biological writings, many difficulties have been 

 raised, and many phenomena have remained inexplicable, because of 

 fallacious reasoning that occupied itself with terms which have been 

 inaccurately defined, and which mean much less than they are taken 

 to mean. There are several prominent instances of this fallacy, 

 notably in connection with the words adaptation, piivposefid or zwechndssig, 

 variation, acquired, and others ; but by far the most remarkable case 

 of the uncritical use of an ill-defined term may be observed in most 

 of the speculative writings where the word character is prominent, and 

 the same is true of the German Eigenschaft, or Mevkmal. The frequent 

 term hereditary tendency, used as it is in a sense not greatly differing 

 from the word character, is also a great source of confusion, and needs 

 the same examination as does the latter. 



*' Character " appears on every other page of our biological works, 

 and is a term we could not well do without. It has always 

 had so obvious a meaning, and is now from long use so familiar to the 

 ear, that it is difficult always to keep in mind what the limitations of 

 the term should be. This character is, or is not, inherited ; that other 

 tends to vary : these are plain and intelligible phrases, and are 

 apparently incapable of introducing serious error when used in the 

 study of organisms. But as a matter of fact the term is extremely 

 wide ; it may, indeed, include almost anything, yet it is often used as 

 if it had a definite meaning, or answered to real distinctions of parts 

 or relations of the organism, or as if a character could justly be 

 regarded as a unit in the study of heredity. The characters of an 

 organism may be new or atavistic or neither ; acquired or congenital ; 

 individual, specific, or generic ; quantitative or qualitative ; of a 

 part, of an organ, of a function, or of a relation ; or even the 

 negation of any of these ; and, yet, utterly incoordinate as they are in 

 kind and amount, utterly arbitrary and changing as are their limita- 

 tions, they are constantly regarded as units, not only rightly, to the 

 observer, but wrongly, to the organism ; are talked of as being present 

 or absent, or as varying in one way or another without affecting the 

 rest of the body, and as only occasionally being connected with one 

 another so as to show a relation of interdependence. Even where 



