214 EVOLUTION 



tion essentially mechanical, in terms of the 

 division of labour, the cumulative patenting 

 and the like, which were gradually evolving 

 the express locomotives or the manufacturing 

 plant of Darwin's day, and now the flying - 

 machine in our own. Hence, too, views essen- 

 tially competitive and commercial, albeit of 

 various shadings, from old-fashioned indivi- 

 dual efficiency to cheaper and cheaper under- 

 sellings, with advantages here from advertise- 

 ments more and more brightly and seductively 

 coloured, there from deceptive imitations more 

 and more subtly wrought. " Competition is 

 the life of Trade " : then why not also the 

 trade of Life ? Yet with all this freshness 

 and vigour of economic application, there 

 has prevailed in the main, and still prevails, 

 a naive forgetfulness of the social origins of 

 these naturalists' discoveries. 



Similarly in neo-Darwinian times. With 

 united and real respect for Weismann, for 

 whose work one of us has once and again 

 acted as translator and editor, the other yet 

 ventures to urge one of the very few criticisms 

 which that wide and fair-minded and subtle 

 thinker seems never to have considered : the 

 striking social parallelism of his own theory 

 of the germ-plasm, of the ovum's strict in- 

 heritance, with the thought of contemporary 



