INADEQUACY OF NATURAL SELECTION, ETC. 685 



After showinor that the interpretation I put upon his view was 

 justified by certain passages quoted ; and after pointing out that 

 one of his adherents had set forth the view which I combated — 

 if not as his view yet as supplementary to it ; I went on to criti- 

 cize the view as set forth afresh by Professor Weismann himself. 

 I showed that as thus set forth the actuality of the supposed 

 cause of decrease in disused organs, implies that minus variations 

 habitually exceed plus variations — in degree or in number, or in 

 both. Unless it can be proved that such an excess ordinarily 

 occurs, the hypothesis of panmixia has no place ; and I asked, 

 where is the proof that it occurs. 



No reply. 



Not content with this abstract form of the question I put it 

 also in a concrete form, and granted for the nonce Professor 

 AVeismann's assumption : taking the case of the rudimentary hind 

 limbs of the whale. I said that though, during those early 

 stages of decrease in which the disused limbs were external, 

 natural selection probably had a share in decreasing them, since 

 they were then impediments to locomotion, yet when they became 

 internal, and especially when they had dwindled to nothing but 

 remnants of the femurs, it is impossible to suppose that natural 

 selection played any part : no whale could have survived and 

 initiated a more prosperous stirp in virtue of the economy 

 achieved by such a decrease. The operation of natural selection 

 being out of the question, I inquired whether such a decrease, 

 say of one-half when the femurs weighed a few ounces, occurring 

 in one individual, could be supposed in the ordinary course of 

 reproduction to affect the whole of the whale species inhabiting 

 the Arctic Seas and the North Atlantic Ocean ; and so on with 

 successive diminutions until the rudiments had reached their 

 present minuteness. I asked whether such an interpretation could 

 be rationally entertained. 



No reply. 



Now in the absence of replies to these two questions it seems 

 to me that the verdict must go against Professor Weismann by 

 default. If he has to surrender the hypothesis of panmixia, what 

 results ? All that evidence collected by Mr. Darwin and others, 

 regarded by them as proof of the inheritance of acquired charac- 

 ters, which was cavalierly set aside on the strength of this alleged 

 process of panmixia, is reinstated. And this reinstated evidence, 

 joined with much evidence since furnished, suffices to establish 

 the repudiated interpretation. 



In the printed report of his Romanes Lecture, after fifty pages 

 of complicated speculations which we are expected to accept as 

 proofs, Professor Weismann ends by saying, in reference to the 

 case of the neuter insects : — 



