38 CHANGE 



If the variations were persistent " Mendelian " 

 characters, and could not be obliterated in the 

 course of breeding, they would still be limited for 

 many generations to a very small circle ; and, in 

 cases where they did not endow their possessors 

 with a positive advantage in the struggle for 

 life, it is difficult to conceive how the members of 

 this circle could increase so greatly as to drive 

 out of existence the original species. If they were 

 merely small fluctuations, of the type contem- 

 plated by Darwinists, they would be even less 

 likely to spread, for reasons which have already 

 been given. The chances of development would 

 be greatly increased were the new characters 

 associated with prepotency in reproductive power, 

 and still more were individuals of the old type 

 losing their fertility and tending towards ex- 

 tinction. Of the inhabitants of England, at the 

 time of the Norman Conquest, a single pair of 

 individuals, endowed with sufficient reproductive 

 prepotency to transmit to their descendants the 

 capacity of doubling themselves in each genera- 

 tion, could have been the ancestors of the whole 

 of the present population that is to say, could 

 have spread any peculiarities which they possessed 

 to the whole of the English people. But there is 

 no evidence to show that " sports " are more 

 fertile than normal individuals, or that their 

 appearance marks a general decline of fertility 

 in the species. Accepting evolution as the origin 

 of species, but despairing of the discovery of the 

 processes by which it has come about, we may 

 be tempted to take refuge in the assumption that 

 its course was preordained, and may be likened to 

 the development oi an individual from its em- 

 bryonic stage to maturity. Were we able to 

 observe only one stage of this development an 

 egg, for instance, after so many days of incuba- 



