ADAPTATION AND SELECTION IN NATURE. ] 15 



■ In coiu'se of time the slow modifications of the environ- 

 ments through physical and chemical processes must be 

 supposed to have transformed these primitive organisms, 

 but the former being homogeneous the latter could only be 

 modified en masse, so that hitherto no place for individual 

 variation has arisen. There is thus postulated a state of 

 things in which various centres of life arose according as 

 vast areas of the surface began to differ from one another, 

 and large collections of minute organisms must be assumed 

 to have been existing, marked off from one another by 

 slowly developing geographical changes, the habitats of 

 the different groups very slowly coming into contact with 

 one another at their borders. These may be considered to 

 have come together in the lapse of ages, but for immense 

 stretches of geological time no reproduction of the organisms 

 by conjugation would take place. Selection had not yet 

 come into operation. I would here point out how large a 

 demand must be made in this hypothetical account of 

 primitive life on the globe, on the view that environmental 

 changes affect organisms so that the variations are transmitted 

 to succeeding generations, a proposition totally denied by 

 the consensus of opinion of present day biologists. Even 

 so late as last year, 1901, Professor Ewart in the presidential 

 address in the zoological section of the British Association, 

 said at Glasgow, " I do not believe there is any trustworthy 

 evidence that definite somatic variations are ever trans- 

 mitted." Hitherto the chain of life has not proceeded far, 

 and it has been enormously assisted by hypothesis up to this 

 point. Variations in individuals are not yet fairly accounted 

 for at all. The fundamental cause of variation (which is the 

 crux of the whole question of evolution, so much so that 

 Bateson said lately " Variation is Evolution " ) is diversity of 

 sex as Wallace, in Darivinism, p. 439, points out. 



Also see Professor Adam ISedgwick at Dover in 1899. 



I am not prepared to deny the gi'eat effect of external 

 conditions in modifying plastic rudimentary forms of life any 

 more than in the case of man himself, but it is necessary to 

 picture to oneself the deeply purposeful issues involved in 

 such changes in the protista that one branch of their stock 

 was destined to produce the whole vegetable kingdom,, 

 which was to come, and the other the animal kingdom, 

 bearing especially in mind the intimate and absolutely 

 essential inter-relation between the two kingdoms. 



Apart from Design this must be supposed to be involved 



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