210 Inheritance of Acquired Characte~s 
ous and quite unfounded, especially when one thinks that 
apart from that there is no process or phenomenon in 
the organic world which Weismann does not ascribe to 
the almightiness of natural selection. Thus the power 
of regeneration, sexual reproduction, the physiological 
necessity of death in the pluricellular forms, all are based 
upon natural selection. And is the almightiness of nat- 
ural selection insufficient only for the inheritance of 
acquired characters? 
After bringing to a close this rapid review of the 
objections which Weismann can always oppose to any 
argument, thus enabling him to save himself from com- 
plete defeat at least with the help of mere words and 
with a semblance of logic, it remains for us, before 
passing to the following chapter, to examine two other 
objections to his views which seem to us particularly im- 
portant, in that the arguments which he opposes to them 
appear to involve his own theory in the most striking 
contradictions. These are the inexplicability of co- 
ordinated variations, and the repetition of phylogeny by 
ontogeny, and with these we shall close the present 
chapter. 
The objection to the conception of the complete 
sufficiency of natural selection which arises from co- 
ordinated variations is well known. When the utility 
of certain modifications of the organism depends upon 
the correlative development of many quite different 
parts natural selection cannot account for the inter- 
dependent, phylogenetic modifications, since, for the 
production of these latter, it can act at best only upon 
special fortuitous variations which are independent of 
others and. from that very fact totally useless. 
Roux for example describes in a masterly way the 
