BroLtocy AND MATHEMATICS Daly 
Then came Commodore Perry, humiliations to the inordinate 
pride of a hermit nation, defeats, contempt, a tremendous 
response to the changes in stimuli, and today dark pagan Japan 
is easily defeating the largest European Christian white nation: 
variability unchanged, variation the greatest recorded in human 
history. 
According to Quetelet’s celebrated law of variability pub- 
lished some years after Darwin’s Origin of Species, it is subject 
to the law of probability, and according to this law the occur- 
rence of variations, their frequency and their degree of variation 
can be calculated and predicted in the same way as the chance 
of death, of murders, of fires. 
But such applications did not fit actual evolution, since the 
law is to deal with different degrees of the same qualities, giving 
a continuity production of species, while as De Vries has so 
stressed, the origin may be by abrupt jumps, by sports, by 
mutations. 
De Vries has said that a thorough study of Quetelet’s law 
would no doubt at once have revealed the weak point in Darwin’s 
conception of the process of evolution. It would have shown 
that the phenomena which are ruled by this law and which are 
bound to such narrow limits, cannot be a basis for the explanation 
of the origin of species. 
It rules the degrees and amounts of qualities, but not the 
qualities themselves. 
Species, however, as De Vries says, are not in the main dis- 
tinguished from their allies by quantities, nor by degrees; the 
very qualities differ. 
How such differences of qualitative character have been 
created is the burning question. They have not been explained 
by continuous accretion of individual variations. 
The attitude of the new mathematics strongly favors 
attempts like the mutation theory, based on the abrupt, explo- 
sive changes, wholly discrete, which under the name of “‘sports”’ 
had long been observed and known in horticulture and animal 
breeding, and of which DeVries has found a whole fusillade being 
shot off by ‘‘ Lamarck’s evening primrose.”’ 
Here he says there is no gradual, no continuous change or 
modification, nor even a common change of all the individuals. 
On the contrary, he says, the main group remains wholly unat- 
fected by the production of new species. After eighteen years 
it is absolutely the same as at the beginning. It is not changed 
in the slightest degree. Yet it produces in the same locality, 
and at the same time, from the same group of plants, a number 
of new species diverging in different ways. 
The vastly vaunted natural selection, then, can only destroy 
new species, never create them. 
