ACQUIREMENT VERSUS SELECTION 453 
features as adaptive as possible; but even here we have to 
admit that the features which best distinguish clematises 
from anemonies are the ones that are least obviously adaptive. 
Thus, for example, it would seem to be highly improbable 
that the life of a plant or the welfare of its offspring could 
ever depend upon whether it had four or five sepals, and in 
our endeavor to connect this character with some adaptative 
feature we had to make a succession of roundabout supposi- 
tions. Yet most species of clematis are distinguished from 
anemonies by this very character, while the sharpest distinc- 
tion between the flowers of these genera is in the estivation. 
Here purely mechanical causes seem sufficient to account 
for clematis having the valvate form while anemony has the 
imbricate arrangement. A review of our generic, family, 
and ordinal definitions will show that the main dependence 
of systematists is upon just such non-adaptive characters 
as those of floral plan, leaf arrangement, or mode of branch- 
ing. If from this very large class of non-adaptive characters 
we subtract all the cases which give evidence of being either 
vestigial or correlative, we have left a considerable number 
inadequately accounted for by natural selection. It does not 
help matters for Darwinians to plead that we are very ig- 
norant of the functions of all living things, and hence that 
peculiarities seemingly useless may really be useful; for 
questioning our ability to distinguish what is useful from 
what is not tells against our suppositions regarding the uses 
of parts quite as truly as it does against a belief in their use- 
lessness. Lamarckism seems weakest when it attempts to 
account for highly developed adaptations; Darwinism when 
it deals with non-adaptive characters. 
We are led into further difficulties by Darwin’s neice 
that the great intensity of the struggle for existence resulting 
from over-production would suffice to perpetuate even 
slightly useful peculiarities. If we ask ourselves what really 
happens to the large number of seeds ripened by each genera- 
tion, we cannot fail to see that the struggle which Dar- — 
winians suppose to result from this immense number is much 
overdrawn. I am writing these lines in a pine grove. The 
trees are loaded with cones and from them come whirling 
