16 DARWINISM TO-DAY. 



larly we may postpone any immediate reference to the facts 

 of Artificial Selection (so important in any account of Dar- 

 winism), that process, more or less familiar to us all, 

 whereby the plant and animal breeders quickly and exten- 

 sively modify the particular species with which they deal so 

 as to produce, to order, as it were, manifold new kinds 

 (races) of organisms. Despite the complexity of methods 

 used in artificial selection, due to the combining of hybrid- 

 isation, direct modification by varying nutrition, grafting, 

 budding, etc., with selection, the basic and all-important 

 -essential is the selecting of a few individuals, namely, those 

 which show the desired variations, to live long enough to 

 produce offspring, and the killing out before maturity of the 

 thousands of individuals that show unfortunate variations : 

 (unfortunate, that is, from the breeder's point of view). 

 In the gardens of that extraordinary plant-breeder, Luther 

 Burbank, in California, great bonfires of discarded seedlings 

 correspond to the succumbing of the thousands in field and 

 forest in the natural struggle for existence, while tenderly 

 cared for little rows of pots contain the fortunate few which 

 have withstood the rigours of the artificial competition. 



A part of Darwinism, which has already been named as 

 such, is the theory of Sexual Selection; but the details of 

 this, too, we may leave unexplained for the 

 moment in order not too much to trouble the 

 reader and the author, whose aim just now is 

 to define the essential thought or conception in Darwinism, 

 and to distinguish between this essential Darwinism and 

 the different and wholly independent theory of descent. 

 Sexual selection is one of Darwin's supporting theories 

 which has nearly gone quite by the board. It is based on a 

 postulated particular and limited kind of natural selection, 

 not involving determination between life and death, but a 

 determination between going childless and leaving posterity, 

 which is, after all, the essential determination in general 



