324 READINGS IN EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 
crop of variations at present supplied; there is no reason to believe 
that it was less abundant in the past. 
Misunderstanding I1.—Interpretations are not facts-——There are 
many adaptive characters in plants and animals which may be super- 
ficially interpreted as due to the direct result of use and disuse or 
of environmental influence. The Lamarckians have so interpreted 
them, and the Lamarckian way of looking at adaptations has become 
habitual to many uncritical minds. They see on modern flowers the 
footprints of insects which have visited them for untold ages; they 
speak of the dwindling of the whale’s hind-limbs through disuse, of the 
hardening of the ancestral horses’ hoofs as they left the marshes and 
ran on harder ground; they picture the giraffe by persistent effort 
lengthening out its neck a few millimetres every century, as the acacia 
raised its leaves higher and higher off the ground; and they say that 
animate nature is so full of evidences of the inheritance of acquired 
characters that no further argument is needed. 
But all this is a begging of the question. It is easy to find struc- 
tural features which may be interpreted as entailed acquired characters, 
if acquired characters can be entailed. Obviously, however, we must 
deal with what we can prove to be modifications, or with what we can 
plausibly regard as modifications because we find their analogues in 
actual process of being effected to-day. 
It is easy to say that the blackness of the negro’s skin was produced 
by the tropical sun, and that it is now part of his natural inheritance. 
It is easy to say this, but absolutely futile. Let us first catch our 
modifications. 
The Golden Rod (Solidago virgaurea) growing on the Alps is pre- 
cocious in its flowering when compared with representatives of the 
same species growing in the lowlands. Hoffmann found that Alpine 
forms transplanted to Giessen remained precocious, therefore the 
acquired precocity had become heritable. But there is no evidence 
that the precocity was acquired; it may have been the outcome of the 
selection of germinal variations. 
The African Wart-hog (Phacochoerus) has the peculiar habit of 
kneeling down on its fore-limbs as it routs with its huge tusks in the 
ground and pushes itself forward with its hind-limbs. It has strong 
horny callosities protecting the surfaces on which it kneels, and these 
are seen even in the embryos. This seems to some naturalists to be a 
satisfactory proof of the inheritance of an acquired character. It is to 
others simply an instance of an adaptive peculiarity of germinal origin 
wrought out by natural selection. 
