232 SPECULATIVE SCIENCE 





A Darwinian may grant all that has been said, but contend 

 that the offspring of ' sports ' is not intermediate between the 

 new sport and the old species ; he may say that a great number 

 of the offspring will retain in full vigour the peculiarity constitu- 

 ting the favourable sport. Darwin seems with hesitation to 

 make some such claim as this, and though it seems contrary 

 to ordinary experience, it will be only fair to consider this hypo- 

 thesis. Let an animal be born with some useful peculiarity, 

 and let all his descendants retain his peculiarity in an eminent 

 degree, however little of the first ancestor's blood be in them ; 

 then it follows, from mere mathematics, that the descendants of 

 our gifted beast will probably exterminate the descendants of 

 his inferior brethren. If the animals breed rapidly the work of 

 substitution would proceed with wonderful rapidity, although 

 it is a stiff mathematical problem to calculate the number of 

 generations required in any given case. To put this case 

 clearly beside the former, we may say that if in a tribe of a 

 given number of individuals there appears one super-eminently 

 gifted, and if the advantage accruing to the descendants bears 

 some kind of proportion to the amount of the ancestor's blood 

 in their veins, the chances are considerable that for the first few 

 generations he will have many descendants ; but by degrees this 

 advantage wanes, and after many generations the chances are 

 so far from being favourable to his breed covering the ground 

 exclusively, that they are actually much against his having any 

 descendants at all alive, for though he has a rather better 

 chance of this than any of his neighbours, yet the chances are 

 greatly against any one of them. It is infinitely improbable 

 that the descendants of any one should wholly supplant the 

 others. If, on the contrary, the advantage given by the sport 

 is retained by all descendants, independently of what in com- 

 mon speech might be called the proportion of blood in their 

 veins directly derived from the first sport, then these descend- 

 ants will shortly supplant the old species entirely, after the 

 manner required by Darwin. 



But this theory of the origin of species is surely not the 

 Darwinian theory ; it simply amounts to the hypothesis that, 

 from time to time, an animal is born differing appreciably from 

 its progenitors, and possessing the power of transmitting the 



