NATURAL SELECTION 105 



has given of the persistency of generic characters in 

 appearing in individuals of derived species, constitute 

 the sole foundation upon which Darwin has based his 

 assumption that individual traits persist through 

 constant intercrossing in maintaining themselves for a 

 dozen and even a score of generations, and that they 

 have the power of lying latent, and of transmitting 

 from the time when they first appeared in an ancestor, 

 a tendency to reappear for hundreds of generations, 

 until, under certain favourable conditions, they are 

 resuscitated with developmental vigour. It is in this 

 paragraph that Darwin reaps the harvest of having 

 with infinite skill and dexterity confounded two entities 

 so different in their nature as generic characters and 

 individual variations. 



All the persistent vitality of generic traits acting 

 through an inheritance unbroken and continuously 

 transmitted since the origin of the genus, is transferred 

 to the fugitive and unfixable individual variation, 

 which Nature has deprived of the power of maintain- 

 ing itself, by depriving it of the power of hereditary 

 transmission, and to which she lias assigned but a few 

 generations as its natural lifetime. Having decided 

 upon this transference of properties and qualities, 

 Darwin was enabled to liberate the latter from all 

 bondage to natural law, giving to it the power of 

 fixing itself at any stage, and of accumulating under 

 impossible conditions, and of building up new species 

 upon the most grotesque and fantastic of all possible 

 hypothetical foundations. 



