xviii MUTATION, MENDELISM, ETC. 



and Mendelism. This is of course an error : Mutation 

 without Selection may be left to those who desire to revive 

 Special Creation under another name. But the error is 

 a not unnatural outcome of the depreciatory and con- 

 temptuous tone adopted by the leader of Mendelism in 

 this country. Passing onwards from one to another, 

 contempt is easily translated into an open expression of 

 disbelief, and for a little day we hear on all sides that 

 the central thoughts of Darwin and Wallace were in vain. 

 But even while these random assertions are being made, 

 De Vries in Holland and Bateson in England are main- 

 taining that Natural Selection is necessary to the theories 

 of evolution they support — necessary indeed, but, as 

 Bateson teaches, so commonplace as to be unworthy of 

 investigation. 1 



Mutation was of course well known to Darwin. It 

 came before him in a rather extreme but unmistakable 

 form in that clever but discredited work, the Vestiges, 

 and what he thought of it is clearly expressed in the 

 Introduction to the Origin : — ' The author of the 

 " Vestiges of Creation " would, I presume, say that, after 



1 ' To prove the reality of Selection as a factor in evolution is, as I 

 have said, a work of supererogation.' Report British Association, 1904, 



P- 578. 



' That the dread test of Natural Selection must be passed by every 



aspirant to existence, however brief, is a truism which needs no special 

 proof. Those who find satisfaction in demonstrations of the obvious 

 may amply indulge themselves by starting various sorts of some annual, 

 say French poppy, in a garden, letting them run to seed, and noticing 

 in a few years how many of the finer sorts are represented.' 1. c, p. 577. 



It is by no means obvious why, in any particular case, the finer sorts 

 are supplanted. If our object is to ascertain how living things have 

 become what they are (the problem as put by Bateson), a solution can 

 never be attained unless the details of the selective process are studied 

 at least as fully and thoroughly as the material which is subjected to 

 selection. 



