DARWINISM DEFENDED. 141 



tinguished only by plus or minus variations. Indeed one 

 may consider the whole endless manifoldness of organic 

 combinations as only representing greater or lesser num- 

 bers of atoms of the same few elements which are bound to- 

 gether in one molecule. In the third place the statistical 

 studies of variation have not shattered in any respect the 

 conception of an all-sided variation of the single characters, 

 but indeed on the contrary have rather shown that all the 

 parts and attributes of organisms that are accessible to 

 observation appear to us more or less different in different 

 individuals. This all-sided variability has nothing to do 

 with the statement that each single variable element can 

 vary always only toward plus or toward minus. Blue 

 flower petals can appear more or less blue and at the same 

 time reveal their indeterminate, fortuitous, or all-sided 

 variability in differences of form, hairiness, thickness, 

 structure, etc. The same indeterminateness which de Vries 

 claims for his mutations is characteristic also of linear 

 variations." 



Tayler, 8 a Darwinian defender, has discussed this objec- 

 tion as follows : "This objection appears to me to be one of 

 the most weighty of all the objections which have been raised 

 to the selectional hypothesis, and it is further an extremely 

 difficult objection to satisfactorily reply to; first, because it is 

 almost impossible to say in what form of organism the earli- 

 est variations appeared, and without this no judgment on the 

 value of any small variation can be of use; secondly, it is 

 equally essential to know the kind of environment which 

 such an organism was living in; and lastly, if we were 

 fully acquainted with the character of the organism and its 

 environment it would still be difficult to form any adequate 

 opinion on the value of such a variation, owing to the fact 

 that this apparently simple organism would differ so widely 

 from our own functional activity and life that any conclu- 

 sions formed on comparative methods of testing its powers, 



