lx CHARLES OTIS WHITMAN 
disturbed nest when the rigor of natural selection is relaxed. The 
common dove is not so much an automaton. Choice begins to 
appear. ‘‘ With choice no new factor enters, but only plasticity, 
so that the pigeon becomes capable of higher action and is encour- 
aged and even constrained by circumstances to learn to use its 
privilege of choice.”’ ‘This little freedom is the dawning grace of 
a new dispensation in which education by experience comes in 
as an amelioration of the law of elimination. This slight amena- 
bility to natural educational influences cannot of course work 
any great miracles of transformation in a pigeon’s brain, but it 
shows the way to the open door of a freer commerce with the 
external world, through which a brain with richer instinctive 
endowments might rise to higher achievement.” 
‘‘Superiority in instinct endowments and concurring advantages 
of environment would tend to liberate the possessors from the 
severities of natural selection; and thus nature, like domestica- 
tion, would furnish conditions inviting to greater freedom of 
action, and with the same result, namely, that the instincts 
would become more plastic and tractable. Plasticity of instinct 
is not intelligence, but itis the open door through which the greater 
educator, experience, comes in and works every wonder of 
intelligence.”’ 
Evolution 
No account of Whitman’s work would be complete without 
reference to his essay on ‘Evolution and Epigenesis,”’ not only 
because this essay reveals him in one of his most thoughtful 
moods, but because the essay defines very sharply Whitman’s 
attitude toward one of the profound questions of the time—a 
question that was then engaging the best thought and work of 
all serious biologists. His keen critical sense is here shown to 
advantage, his independence of thought led him to break some of 
the idols of the day, and his thorough understanding of what had 
been written and was being written at the time, all conspire to 
make the essay a permanent contribution to our knowledge. He 
succeeds as few others have done in holding the fine balance be- 
tween the two extremes of thought represented by the terms pre- 
