DARWINISM ATTACKED. 45 



increase, there is necessary an extraordinary coincidence in 



the appearance of the needed variations in many forms at 



The needed co- tne right time. That is, a theory based on chance 



incident occur- or accidental phenomena demands after all the 



rence of several . 



variations at one assumption of the occurrence of phenomena 

 tlme> of the right kind at the right moment, and 



the persistence of such occurrences through a definite 

 time-period. This is too much to assume, too much to ask 

 even of those of the true faith, say the antagonists 1S i4 of 

 the selection theory. Kronig 15 makes sport of the selection 

 doctrine by having his rather frivolous character, Sabiich- 

 winski, undertake to have made, by a foolish clown, various 

 trifling changes in all kinds of industrial products with the 

 expectation of bringing them into the market. He is con- 

 vinced that he will win a fortune by this, for he says to 

 himself that the struggle for supremacy must work out the 

 same in the industries as in nature, and in his case with the 

 added advantage that the changes effected by even the most 

 slender-witted boor must result better than those which are 

 the outcome of perfectly blind chance. Indeed, from the 

 very heart of the neo-Darwinian ranks come signs of dis- 

 may when this objection is faced. Weismann, leader of the 

 ultra-selectionists, practically concedes the irrefutability of 

 this objection to the Allinacht of selection when he intro- 

 duces a statement of his latest theory, that of Germinal 

 Selection, by saying: 16 "Knowing this factor [that of germi- 

 nal selection] we remove, it seems to me, the 



Weismann's . , -11 



admission of the patent contradiction of the assumption that the 



" enera l fitness of organisms or the adaptations 

 necessary to their existence are produced by 

 accidental variations a contradiction which formed a seri- 

 ous stumbling-block to the theory of selection." And the 

 formulation of the theory of germinal selection is of itself 

 a practical confession on the part of the foremost neo- 

 Darwinian of the inability of natural selection to explain 



