INADEQUACY OP NATURAL SELECTION, ETC. 631 



were some of his interpretations, they succeeded in mitigating 

 the sense of their own error. It is true their creed was that at 

 successive periods in the Earth's history, old Floras and Faunas 

 had been abolished and others introduced ; just as though, to use 

 Professor Huxley's figure, the table had been now and again 

 kicked over and a new pack of cards brought out. And it is 

 true that Lamarck, while he rejected this absurd creed, assigned 

 for the facts reasons some of which are absurd. But in conse- 

 quence of the feeling described, his defensible belief was for- 

 gotten and only his indefensible ones remembered. This one- 

 sided estimate has become traditional ; so that there is now often 

 shown a subdued contempt for those who suppose that there can 

 be any truth in the reasonings of a man whose general concep- 

 tion was partly sense, at a time when the general conceptions of 

 his contemporaries were wholly nonsense. Hence results unfair 

 treatment — hence result the different dealings with the views of 

 Lamarck and of Weismann. 



" Where are the facts proving the inheritance of acquired 

 characters ? " ask those who deny it. Well, in the first place, 

 there might be asked the counter-question — Where are the facts 

 which disprove it ? Surely if not only the general structures of 

 organisms, but also many of the modifications arising in them, 

 are inheritable, the natural implication is that all modifications 

 are inheritable ; and if any say that the inheritableness is limited 

 to those arising in a certain way, the onus lies on them of proving 

 that those otherwise arising are not inheritable.* Leaving this 

 counter-question aside, however, it will suffice if we ask another 

 counter-question. It is asserted that the dwindling of organs 

 from disuse is due to the successive survivals in posterity of 

 individuals in which the organs have varied in the direction of 



* It will, I suppose, be said that the non-inheritance of mutilations consti- 

 tutes evidence of the kind here asked for. The first reply is that the evidence 

 is conflicting, as it may well be. It is forgotten that to have valid evidence 

 of non-inheritance of mutilations, it is requisite that both parents shall have 

 undergone mutilation, and that this does not often happen. If they have not, 

 then, assiuiiing the inheritableness of mutilations, there would, leaving out 

 other causes, be an equal tendency to appearance and non-appearance of the 

 mutilation in offspring. But there is another cause — the tendency to rever- 

 sion, which ever works in the direction of cancelling individual characters 

 by the return to ancestral characters. So that even were the inheritance of 

 mutilations to be expected (and for myself I may say that its occurrence sur- 

 prises me), it could not be rensonably looked for as more than exceptional: 

 there are two strong coimtervailing tendencies. But now, in the second place, 

 let it be remarked that the inheritance or non-inheritance of mutilations id 

 beside the question. The question is whether modifications of parts pro- 

 duced by modifications of functions are inheritable or not. And then, by way 

 of disproof of their inheritableness, we arc referred to cases in which the 

 modifications of parts arc not produced by modifications of functions, but are 

 otherwise produced ! 

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