ORTHOGENESIS 335 



Poulton tells us that Lamarckian evolution, Spencerian evolu- 

 tion, appeals to the mind of man far more strongly than 

 Darwinian evolution. Everyone of us, he says, would have 

 made the world according to Lamarck. " We would have made 

 evolution by use and disuse of parts and not by Natural 

 Selection." 



It should be borne in mind, however, as I have pointed 

 out in Evolution by Co-operation, that there is not 

 only use and disuse in the world, but also an abundance 

 of jnisuse, and hence there has to be a corresponding 

 amount of protection against misuse, which of course 

 must frequently express itself as so much intolerance 

 of acquisitions. We cannot expect Nature to be very 

 anxious to bring about the inheritance of anything that 

 is connected with misuse ; and if unwittingly and for want 

 of a proper analysis we are most generally drawn to the study 

 of the abnormal (which is generally as conspicuous as it is also 

 abundant), we must expect to meet with difficulties of heredity 

 and indeed difficulties of all sorts. 



So long as the chief function of an organism and the chief 

 influence of the biological environment viz., the bio-economic 

 are overlooked, and so long as the organism is studied locally 

 and singly without reference to bio-economic developments, we 

 cannot expect to obtain any but incongruous results. Super- 

 ficial consideration of a few such results has led to the belief 

 that no "acquired" characters can be inherited. 



But though the (abundant) chaff is not wanted, the rare 

 grains are, and the treasures of the grains, though incon- 

 spicuous, are well guarded, cherished, and increased in 

 Nature by symbiogenetic means. Biological correspondences, 

 as we have seen, are a part of such heritable acquisitions 

 (capital) quite as much as are structural additions. Indeed, 

 as we have found, such heritable biological correspondences 

 constitute in great part the wealth of a species, and, hence, 

 the mechanism of the inheritance of acquisitions must be 

 looked for among these correspondences and their results, quite 



