236 FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART iv 



panmixia ; the cessation of natural selection will 

 produce all the results commonly attributed to use- 

 inheritance. Use-inheritance would be a much 

 quicker process ; but have patience with natural 

 selection (or with panmixia), in a few tens of thou- 

 sands of years it will do all that you require. Other 

 suggestions are that, in dark caves, the fish which 

 put part of its physiological capital into a superfluous 

 sense would be positively disadvantaged by its eyes 

 in the struggle for existence. Having wasted its 

 resources on an inherited habit of luxury, it would 

 fail in securing the necessaries of life. And again, 

 Professor Ray Lankester has suggested that the 

 fishes with good eyesight would find cracks by which 

 they could swim away, leaving behind them only the 

 blind or purblind. If any of these were suffering 

 from mere accidents to their eyes, they would of 

 course on Weismann's hypothesis beget a progeny 

 having eyesight. But, if any had their vision con- 

 genitally dim or dark, they would become the parents 

 of those blind fish which we know. 



Thus the facts give an uncertain answer, and we 

 are driven to make a statement of the blendings of 

 fact with hypothesis which have been championed on 

 one side or the other. Theories of heredity are in- 

 vented to suit the facts, so far as known, but they lie 

 far beneath the strata where verification is possible, 

 at least in the present state of our knowledge. 



The simplest and most natural assumption is that 

 the embryo, or its antecedents, spermatozoon and 

 ovum, owe their qualities directly to the parental 

 organisms. " The owl comes from the egg, but like- 

 wise the egg comes from the owl." And this natural 



