NA TURE 



\_Dcc. 3, 1885 



(if ice, may all be supposed capable of checking the escape of 

 the gas. However, we have first to verify the fact. On the 

 .appearance of Mr. Harding's letter, I wrote to the Hon. W. H. 

 Gosling, of Bermuda, a gentleman well known for his interest in 

 matters of scientific inquiry, and begged him to investigate the 

 story. His reply is before me, dated November 4 ; — 



"On Saturday, October 31, I visited the spot where the 

 balloon was alleged to have been seen. I am convinced of the 

 fact. The place is a high hill east of the lighthouse. The two 

 women were accidentally out in a field near where they live. 

 Mrs. Bassett saw the object in the sky, high up, many times 

 higher than the light. It seemed to her under the clouds. 

 She knew nothing of balloons, and thought a whirlwind had 

 raised some nets from the sea, as it appeared to her an object 

 frorti which nets were suspended. She fancied she saw the 

 corks of the net hanging at the bottom." (Mr. Gosling here 

 remarks, " No doubt the basket, or the remains of it, of the 

 former account, with chains, were the suggestion of her 

 husband, who did not see it.") "She called her neighbour, 

 and they both watched its course out over the sea, south, until 

 it disappeared from view, which would not take long, as a brisk 

 north wind was blowing. No one else seems to have seen it, 

 nor would these, had not one of them accidentally looked up. 



" I cannot hear of any balloon having been sent up in 

 America, but on September 17, three weeks later, a balloon 

 impaled itself on a church steeple in Chicago, U.S. The 

 basket contained some torn clothing, and a branch of oak, as if it 

 had come in contact with trees. The wind here on the three 

 succeeding days was east, south-east, south. I suppose you 

 know of the report of the missing balloon from Paris, in July, 

 seen afterwards in the Bay of Biscay, going west." 



So far Mr. Gosling, who incloses an intelligent letter from 

 Mr. Robert T. Bassett, husband ol the first witness, giving 

 some compass bearings. 



The Monthly Weather Review of the United States for Sep- 

 tember, which has not yet reached England, may perhaps throw 

 light on the probability of an object seen floating in the air over 

 Bermuda on August 27, whether arrived from Europe or not, 

 being transported to Chicago by September 17. The coincidence 

 is remarkable, but I know nothing of this incident beyond Mr. 

 Gosling's mention of it. High winds with heavy rains pre- 

 vailed in the South Atlantic and East Gulf States of the Ameri- 

 can Union on August 31, and the centre of a cyclone travelling 

 in a north-easterly direction was then off the coast of South 

 Carolina. A balloon drifting south from Bermuda on August 27 

 would be caught in the south-east quadrant of such a cyclone ; 

 and if it kept afloat long enough would, in a few days, be 

 landed in a north-westerly and then in a northerly direction. The 

 conditions of the question oblige me to assume that it is not a 

 physical impossibility for a balloon, with very little weight at- 

 tached, to drift about for weeks ; but the singularity of the 

 occurrence calls for every investigation, and should you admit 

 this long communication, I hope that further evidence may be 

 procurable from Chicago. J. H. Lefroy 



Par Station, Cornwall, November 23 



"Evolution without Natural Selection" 

 Believing as I do that the words of a reviewer should be 

 final, it is with no small amount of hesitation that I pen the 

 following few remarks on the review of my little work entitled 

 " Evolution without Natural .Selection," which appeared in 

 Nature of November 12 (p. 26). The curious way in which 

 my book has been misunderstood, and my consequent endeavour 

 to put matters in a clear and impartial light, must be my apology 

 for taking up your valuable space. In the first place, Mr. 

 Romanes finds fault with the title of my book ; but why, it is 

 hard to conjecture. I venture to assert that nine-tenths of the 

 matter it contains attempt to illustrate the operation of evolution 

 without any natural selective process, as any impartial reader 

 must admit ; consequently, I absolutely deny that I only reserved 

 a few odds and ends of small detail which I ascribed to other 

 agencies. I might also state that I had a reason, and I think a 

 very good one, in confining my remarks exclusively to birds. 

 Had I elected to cover a wider area, I could have shown that 

 these " odds and ends," as Mr. Romanes somewhat contemptu- 

 ausly calls them, do not by any means exclusively apply to birds, 

 but to species in every other depirtment of natural history. Mr. 

 Romanes goes on to say that "It is the very essence of the 

 Darwinian hypothesis that it only seeks to explain the apparently 



purposive variations, or variations of an adaptive kind ; and, 

 theiefore, if any variations are taken to be non-adaptive, ex 

 hypolhesi they cannot have been due to natural selection." Pre- 

 cisely. And it was the immense amount of what I may call 

 non-purposive variation which forms the line of demarcation 

 between such vast numbers of species that I have attempted to 

 explain by other agencies when natural selection utterly fails to 

 do so. I most emphatically deny that I ever said, or even in- 

 ferred, that these variations are " for the most part rare," as Mr. 

 Romanes leads the reader of his review to suppose. All natu- 

 ralists who are in the habit of working through large series of 

 specimens are well aware of the immense number of species 

 whose claim to rank as such is based upon their slight variation 

 from a dominant type. It took me five years' hard work 

 amongst tens of thousands of specimens to .arrive at the con- 

 clusions expressed in my little book ; and, in my opinion, no 

 naturalist is qualified to write on these subjects without serving 

 such an apprenticeship. That is why, as a specialist, I confined 

 myself to birds alone for my exnmples. In the face of the array 

 of important facts which I endeavoured to chronicle, it seems 

 strange for a naturalist of such standing as Mr. Romanes to state 

 that these facts "may be freely presented to the anti-Darwin- 

 ians." Why "anti-Darwinians," Mr. Romanes? No one but 

 an evolutionist (and most evolutionists are surely Darwinians) 

 would attach any importance to these "trivial variations," and 

 consequent intergradation of specific forms. Mr. Romanes is 

 careful to point out how Darwin himself admits that if these 

 trivial specific characters are " really of no considerable import- 

 ance in the struggle for life, they could not be modified or 

 formed through natural selection." Now probably it is no 

 exaggeration to say that at least one-third of the known recog- 

 nised species absolutely rest on these "trivial specific cha- 

 racters." If they have not been evolved by natural selection, I 

 maintain that other and as equally potent agents as natural 

 selection have been at work. The object of my little book was 

 to try and explain them. 



A word as to the cause of variation. No one who under- 

 stands anything at all about the theory of natural selection ever 

 supposes that it is an original cause of variation. Mr. Romanes 

 cannot have read my essay very closely, for had he done so he 

 would have seen that I drew the reader's attention to this fact 

 (conf. p. 49). The cause oi variation is quite another question, 

 and one which after all did not materially concern my treatment 

 of the subject. Nevertheless, I alluded to the use and disuse of 

 organs as a direct cause of variation. I would also wish to 

 point out that Mr. Romanes is entirely in error in saying that I 

 " everywhere speak of isolation as the cause of minute specific 

 characters." All I endeavoured to show was that isolation can 

 preserve a non-beneficial variation when it has arisen, just as 

 much and eftectually as natural selection can preserve]a beneficial 

 variation. 



Did space permit, I would like to say a few words on climatic 

 variation, and the probable times at which natural selection is 

 most active in the evolution of species ; on both which subjects 

 Mr. Romanes unconsciously misrepresents me. My reviewer 

 has nothing whatever to say on my treatment of sexual selection ; 

 the use and disuse of organs, inter-crossing, the local distribu- 

 tion of specialised forms, polar centres as points of dispersal, 

 &c. 



Mr. Romanes seems to think that my little book was written 

 in an anti-Darwinian spirit. Nothing of the sort. On my last 

 page but one I said, " Let it be cleaidy understood that not one 

 single syllable in the foregoing pages has been written antago- 

 nistic to Darwin's theory of Natural Selection. All I have done 

 has been to attempt to explain certain phenomena which the 

 Darwinian hypothesis can never do, and which its supporters 

 ought never to have attempted to make it explain." If I have 

 not made my meaning plain, and thus left myself open to mis- 

 understanding, it will be a source of great regret. Science and 

 simplicity should be synonymous. In the French edition, 

 shortly to be published, which is now being translated by Dr. 

 Varigny, of Paris, I hope to make a few corrections and addi- 

 tions, which I trust may possibly render me less liable to be 

 misrepresented in future. Charles Dixon 



London, November 21 



I FREELY admit that the impression left upon my mind after 

 reading Mr. Dixon's essay was the same as pthat which was first 

 conveyed by its title — viz. that the author supposed hiswork to 



