434 Eimer on Growth and Inheidtance 



man and the highest faculties of any other animal, that we 

 forbear to say more upon that subject now. Assuming that 

 our readers have grasped the profound distinction which 

 exists between our own higher and lower faculties (a distinc- 

 tion which well enables us to understand the so-called intel- 

 ligence of animals, and especially the difference between 

 intellectual sign-making — whether by sounds or gestures — 

 and merely emotional language), we will now proceed to 

 make the few remarks which seem to us necessary upon the 

 different chapters of Professor Elmer's book. 



His first chapter is devoted to a statement of those doc- 

 trines of Weismann which have been described by us in the 

 beginning of this article, with an account of the specula- 

 tions of another theorist — Nageli — whose notion is that the 

 whole organic world develops and grows by an internal force, 

 as does an ordinary tree. To this innate power he ascribes 

 the different directions in which organisms vary, and the first 

 commencements of new structures, matters for which Dar- 

 winism is, as was long ago pointed out, impotent to account. 

 The action of natural selection can, according to Nageli, be 

 no more than that of a gardener's pruning-knife — an illustra- 

 tion before made use of by ourselves. 



In his second chapter, on ' The Organic Growth of the 

 Living World,' Eimer states his somewhat singular theory 

 as to the true cause of the origin of species, which he attri- 

 butes to the lagging behind of certain individuals in that 

 rate of organic change which surrounding influences impress 

 upon their fellows. 



' We have before us,' he says,i — ' a graduated evolution, and the 

 essential cause of the separation of species is seen to be the persistence 

 of a number of individuals at a definite lower grade of this evolution 

 while the rest advance further in modification. This mode of origin 

 of varieties or species, as the case may be, I have named Genepistasis 

 (yevos, race, iiria-Taa-i^, stand still).' 



1 r. 31. 



