578 REPORT—1904. 
flaw which if allowed to extend will split the type into a host of new varieties each 
with its own peculiarities and physiological constitution. 
Let anyone who doubts this try what he can do by selection without such a 
definite beginning. Let him try from a pure strain of black and white rats to 
raise a white one by breeding from the whitest, or a black one by choosing 
the blackest. Let him try to raise a dwarf (‘Cupid’) sweet pea from a tall 
race by choosing the shortest, or a crested fowl by choosing the birds with 
most feather on their heads. To formulate such suggestions is to expose their 
foolishness. 
The creature is beheld to be very good after, not before its creation, Our 
domesticated races are sometimes represented as so many incarnations of the 
breeder's prophetic fancy. But except in recombinations of pre-existing characters 
—now a comprehensible process—and in such intensifications and such finishing 
touches as involve variations which analogy makes probable, the part played by 
prophecy is small. Variation leads; the breeder follows. The breeder’s method 
is to notice a desirable novelty, and to work up a stock of it, picking up other 
novelties in his course—for these genetic disturbances often spread—and we may 
rest assured the method of Nature is not very different, 
The popular belief that evolution, whether natural or artificial, is effected by 
mass-selection of impalpable differences arises from many errors which are all 
phases of one—imperfect analysis—though the source of the error differs with the 
circumstances of its exponent, When the scientific advocate professes that he has 
statistical proofs of the continuity of variation, he is usually availing himself of 
that comprehensive use of the term Variation to which I have referred. Statistical 
indications of such continuity are commonly derived from the study, not of nascent 
varieties, but of the fluctuations to which all normal populations are subject. 
Truly varying material needs care in its collection, and if found is often sporadic or 
in some other way unsuitable for statistical treatment. Sometimes it happens that 
the two phenomena are studied together in inextricable entanglement, and the 
resulting impression is a blur. 
But when a practical man, describing his own experience, declares that the 
creation of his new breed has been a very long affair, the scientist, feeling that he 
has found a favourable witness, puts forward this testimony as conclusive. But 
on cross-examination it appears that the immense period deposed to seldom goes 
back beyond the time of the witness’s grandfather, covering, say, seventy years; 
more often ten, or eight, or even five years will be found to have accomplished most 
of the business. Next, in this period—which, if we take it at seventy years, is a 
mere point of time compared with the epochs of which the selectionist discourses 
——a momentous transformation has often been effected, not in one character but 
many. Good characters have been added, it may be, of form, fertility, precocity, 
colour, and other physiological attributes, undesirable qualities have been elimi- 
nated, and all sorts of defects ‘rogued’ out. On analysis these operations can be 
proved to depend on a dozen discontinuities. Be it, moreover, remembered that 
within this period, besides producing his mutational character and combining it 
with other characters (or it may be groups of characters), the breeder has been 
working up a stock, reproducing in quantity that quality which first caught his 
attention, thus converting, if you will, a phenomenon of individuals into a pheno- 
menon of a mass, to the future mystification of the careless, 
Operating among such phenomena the gross statistical method is a misleading 
instrument ; and, applied to these intricate discriminations, the imposing Correla- 
tion Table into-which the biometrical Procrustes fits his arrays of unanalysed 
data is still no substitute for the common sieve of a trained judgment, For 
nothing but minute analysis of the facts by an observer thoroughly conversant 
with the particular plant or animal, its habits and properties, checked by the test 
of crucial experiment, can disentangle the truth. 
To prove the reality of Selection as a factor in evolution is, as I have said, a 
work of supererogation, With more profit may experiments be employed in 
defining the mits of what Selection can accomplish. For whenever we can 
advance no further hy Selection, we strike that hard outline fixed by the natural 
