Criticisms of Theory of Natural Selection. 361 
without any reference to utility, either present or 
future. Among all this multitude of promiscuous 
variations, the chances must be that some percentage 
will prove of some service, either from the first moment 
of their appearance, or else after they have undergone 
some amount of development. Such development 
prior to utility may be due, either to correlation of 
growth, to the structure having previously performed 
some other function, as already explained, or else to 
a continued operation of the causes which were con- 
cerned in the first appearance of originally useless 
characters. In a series of chapters which will be 
devoted to the whole question of utility in the next 
volume, I shall hope to give very good reasons for 
concluding that useless characters are not only of 
highly frequent occurrence, but are due to a variety of 
other causes besides correlation of growth. And, if so, 
the possibility of originally useless characters happen- 
ing in some cases to become, by increased develop- 
ment, useful characters, is correspondingly increased. 
Among a hundred varietal or specific characters which 
are directly produced in as many different species by 
a change of climate, for example, some five or six may 
be potentially useful: that is to say, characters thus 
adventitiously produced in an incipient form may 
only require to be further developed by a continuance 
of the same causes as first originated them, in order 
that some percentage of the whole number shall become 
of some degree of use. Those professed followers of 
Darwin, therefore, who without any reason—or, as it 
appears to me, against all reason—deny the pos- 
sibility of useless specific characters in any case or 
in any degree (unless correlated with useful characters), 
