2 io Inheritance of Acquired Characters 



ous and quite unfounded, especially when one thinks that 

 apart from that there is no process or phenomenon in 

 the organic world which Weismann does not ascribe to 

 the almightiness of natural selection. Thus the power 

 of regeneration, sexual reproduction, the physiological 

 necessity of death in the pluricellular forms, all are based 

 upon natural selection. And is the almightiness of nat- 

 ural selection insufficient only for the inheritance of 

 acquired characters ? 



After bringing to a close this rapid review of the 

 objections which Weismann can always oppose to any 

 argument, thus enabling him to save himself from com- 

 plete defeat at least with the help of mere words and 

 with a semblance of logic, it remains for us, before 

 passing to the following chapter, to examine two other 

 objections to his views which seem to us particularly im- 

 portant, in that the arguments which he opposes to them 

 appear to involve his own theory in the most striking 

 contradictions. These are the inexplicability of co- 

 ordinated variations, and the repetition of phylogeny by 

 ontogeny, and with these we shall close the present 

 chapter. 



The objection to the conception of the complete 

 sufficiency of natural selection which arises from co- 

 ordinated variations is well known. When the utility 

 of certain modifications of the organism depends upon 

 the correlative development of many quite different 

 parts natural selection cannot account for the inter- 

 dependent, phylogenetic modifications, since, for the 

 production of these latter, it can act at best only upon 

 special fortuitous variations which are independent of 

 others and from that very fact totally useless. 



Roux for example describes in a masterly way the 



