HEREDITY AND " ARRANGEMENT J: 137 



open-minded of men, hints in one place that 

 though he does not think it necessary himself to 

 believe it, yet it might at least be suggested that, 

 if in a certain organism we find things so placed 

 that a certain combination is bound to emerge in 

 a certain generation, such a state of affairs might 

 have been prearranged. Now, if it was prear- 

 ranged, the awful fact emerges that there must 

 have been an arranger; in other words, a creative 

 power. This explanation is taboo in certain 

 circles. But one may reasonably ask, " What 

 then ? " Is it really suggested that these orderly sets 

 of occurrences may occur not once or twice only 

 but thousands and thousands of times, and this 

 may all happen by chance ? A very distant 

 acquaintance with the mathematics of probability 

 will show that this is a wholly untenable theory. 

 We are generally answered by some purely verbal 

 explanation, like the personification of " Nature " 

 already alluded to. 



Thus, in a recent discussion on inheritance in a 

 Presidential Address to the British Association, 

 to which I have already alluded, the writer with 

 whose explanation I have just been dealing states 

 that he thinks it " unlikely " that the factors 

 of inheritance are " in any simple or literal sense 

 material particles," and proceeds thus : " I suspect 

 rather that their properties depend on some 

 phenomenon of arrangement." Now, in the first 

 place, this is no explanation at all, for the 

 mechanism of inheritance must be either material 

 or immaterial. If there is a phenomenon of 

 " arrangement " there must be something to be 



