WITH DARWIN FORWARDS 225 
that the light saturating through the semi-trans- 
parent tissues of the parent might directly affect the 
germ-cells within. We attach importance to the fact 
that Professor MacBride, one of our foremost 
zoologists, has been definitely convinced that 
Kammerer has proved that acquired qualities are 
to some extent transmitted; but in view of what 
has happened before, we decline to hurry back to 
Lamarck. 
Failing, then, to be convinced that the proposi- 
tion of Lamarck has been in any case proved, we 
return in the meantime to the Darwinian theory 
that the natural selection of variations has been a 
vera causa in evolution. But what we return to is 
not the theory often unjustly treated in summary 
statement, e.g.: “ The evidently-true doctrine of 
the destruction of the less viable was held to explain 
the origin of the more viable.” For Darwin 
made it quite clear that he postulated the raw 
material that was continually supplied to the 
sifting process, and it is only a little farther than 
postulating that we can go to-day when we inquire 
into the origin of intrinsic variations and mutations. 
We may point to certain variational stimuli which 
are known to provoke germinal change, and to the 
familiar opportunities which the ripening and the 
fertilization of the germ-cells offer for re-shufflings 
of the hereditary cards; but when we probe into 
the origin of the distinctively new it is difficult at 
present to get away from the postulate that the 
implicit organism which we call the germ-cell makes 
