REVIEW OF THE POSITION 9 



when he was conferring a medal of the Royal Society on Huxley 

 may illustrate what has been said above. He said that they must 

 all be thankful to have still among them that champion of Evolution 

 who once bore down its enemies, but was now possibly needed to 

 save it from its friends. It may be regretted that it was not so 

 in 1909. 



Three Blows to Darwin. 



But other historic events are more relevant to my immediate 

 purpose than these. 



Three blows were delivered against Darwinism in the years 

 1894, 1895 and 1899 by Prof. Bateson, Weismann, and again Prof. 

 Bateson, under which it seemed to reel, but from which it is more 

 than likely it has derived but greater strength. 



scheme. He has but one insignificant reference to de Vries on p. 95 where 

 he finds help for his doctrine. 



Weismann makes no reference to Mendel or de Vries. De Vries makes 

 none to Weismann or Mendel, but without stating it in his essay he is known 

 to be in opposition to Weismann's dogma on the inheritance of acquired 

 characters. These three eminent biologists would thus seem to have worked 

 on diverging lines. The two first agree heartily, Weismann explicitly and 

 Bateson by implication, as to the forbidden doctrine, " on the ground that it 

 closes the way to deeper insight " — in other words their mutually destructive 

 theories. So it stands thus in the book — Weismann throws over Lamarck, 

 Mendel and de Vries ; Bateson throws over Weismann (as again in 1914) 

 and de Vries ; de Vries ignores Weismann and Mendel. 



Dr. Lock in his book on Variation, Heredity and Evolution, 1906, says 

 that Weismann practically ignores the evidence of Mendelism in heredity, 

 and adds, p. 261, " But at the next step the Mendelian parts company with 

 Weismann." 



One cannot avoid noticing, incidentally, that the vast mass of work of 

 the biometricians led by Galton, Weldon and Professor Karl Pearson is 

 conspicuously absent from the book. Prof. J. Arthur Thomson says that 

 there should be no opposition between Mendelian and Galtonian formulae, 

 " they are correlated, and ultimately they will be seen in complete harmony 

 as different aspects of the same phenomena. But it is simply muddleheaded- 

 ness which can find any opposition between a statistical formula applicable 

 to averages of successive generations breeding freely, and a physiological 

 formula applicable to particular sets of cases where parents with contrasted 

 dominant and recessive characters are crossed and their hybrid offspring are 

 inbred." (a) concerning which see the Preface to Bateson's Mendel's Principles 

 of Heredity, 1902, with remarks on some of the Galtonians. 



Considering the mole-like and persistent work of the biometricians, some 

 who are at present keeping well-ordered lawns may find some day a few 

 disturbing heaps of facts. I am reminded here of an historic duel, Oxford v. 

 Cambridge, which took place soon after the introduction of Mendel's dis- 

 coveries into England at the London Zoological Society, when Prof. Bateson 

 expounded them with enthusiasm and when Weldon repelled them with 

 cogent and incisive arguments. The duel lasted nearly two hours and that 

 was not too long for the audience, but one has the impression that some of 

 what Professor Thomson calls muddleheadedness must have been somewhere 

 existing. However, the duel was fought when Mendelism was young. 



(a) Heredity, p 374. 



