1859—1863] falconer's elephants 207 



at ; and imagine my still greater satisfaction at your ex- Letter 143 

 pressing yourself as an unbeliever in the eternal immutability 

 of species. Your final remarks on my work are too generous, 

 but have given me not a little pleasure. As for criticisms, I 

 have only small ones. When you speak of " moderate range 

 of variation " I cannot but think that you ought to remind 

 your readers (though I daresay previously done) what the 

 amount is, including the case of the American bog-mammoth. 

 You speak of these animals as having being exposed to a vast 

 range of climatal changes from before to after the Glacial 

 period. I should have thought, from analogy of sea-shells, 

 that by migration (or local extinction when migration not 

 possible) these animals might and would have kept under 

 nearly the same climate. 



A rather more important consideration, as it seems to 

 me, is that the whole proboscidean group may, I presume, 

 be looked at as verging towards extinction : anyhow, the 

 extinction has been complete as far as Europe and America 

 are concerned. Numerous considerations and facts have led 

 me in the Origin to conclude that it is the flourishing or 

 dominant members of each order which generally give rise to 

 new races, sub-species, and species ; and under this point of 

 view I am not at all surprised at the constancy of your species. 

 This leads me to remark that the sentence at the bottom of 

 p. [80] is not applicable to my views, 1 though quite applicable 

 to those who attribute modification to the direct action of the 

 conditions of life. An elephant might be more individually 

 variable than any known quadruped (from the effects of the 

 conditions of life or other innate unknown causes), but if these 

 variations did not aid the animal in better resisting all hostile 

 influences, and therefore making it increase in numbers, there 

 would be no tendency to the preservation and accumulation 

 of such variations — i.e. to the formation of a new race. As 

 the proboscidean group seems to be from utterly unknown 



which Falconer allows the existence of intermediate forms along certain 

 possible lines of descent. Falconer's reference to the Sicilian elephants 

 is in a note on p. 78 ; the bog-elephant is mentioned on p. 79. 



1 See Falconer at the bottom of p. 80 : it is the old difficulty — how 

 can variability co-exist with persistence of type? In our copy of the 

 letter the passage is given as occurring on p. 60, a slip of the pen for 

 p. 80. 



