Characters as Adaptive and Specific. 271 



ments be reconciled with the great dogma, " which is 

 indeed a necessary deduction from the theory of 

 Natural Selection, namely, that none of the definite 

 facts of organic nature, no special organ, no character- 

 istic form or marking can exist, but which must now 

 be, or once have been, useful" ? Can it be said that 

 the plumes of a bird of paradise present " no charac- 

 teristic form," or the tail of a peacock " no character- 

 istic marking " ? Can it be held that all the <: fantastic 

 colours/' which Darwin attributes to sexual selection, 

 and all the " strange forms " in the vegetable world 

 which present no conceivable reference to adaptation, 

 are to be ascribed to <; individual variability" without 

 reference to utility, while at the same time it is held, 

 " as a necessary deduction from the theory of Natural 

 Selection," that all specific characters must be ' ; use- 

 ful " ? Or must we not conclude that we have here 

 a contradiction as direct as a contradiction can 

 well be * ? 



Nor is it any more possible to reconcile these 

 contradictory statements by an indefinite extension 

 of the term " correlation," than we found it to be in 

 the cases previously quoted. It might indeed be 

 logically possible, howsoever biologically absurd, to 

 attribute the tail of a peacock with all its elabora- 

 tion of structure and pattern of colour, with all the 

 drain that its large size and weight makes upon the 

 vital resources of the bird, with all the increased 

 danger to which it exposes the bird by rendering it 

 more conspicuous, more easy of capture, &c. to 

 correlation with some useful character peculiar to 



1 Since the above was written both Mr. Gulick and Professor Lloyd 

 Morgan have independently noticed the contradiction. 



