FIFTY YEARS OF DARWINISM 25 



For the same reason acquired characters cannot 

 now be transmitted to offspring. Beccari imag- 

 ines that everything was different in early ages 

 when, as he supposes, life was young and heredity 

 weak. In this assumed " Plasmatic Epoch " the 

 environment acted strongly upon organisms, 

 evoking the responsive changes which have now 

 been rendered fixed and immovable by heredity. 

 Even the hypothesis proposed as a substitute 

 for Natural Selection by so distinguished a bot- 

 anist as Carl Nageli turns out to be most unsat- 

 isfactory the moment it is examined. The idea 

 of evolution under the compulsion of an internal 

 force residing in the idioplasm is in essence but 

 little removed from special creation. On the sub- 

 ject of Nageli's criticisms Darwin wrote,^ Au- 

 gust 10, 1869, to Lord Farrer: — 



*' It is to me delightful to see what appears a mere 

 morphological character found to be of use. It pleases 

 me the more as Carl Nageli has lately been pitching into 

 me on this head. Hooker, with whom I discussed the 

 subject, maintained that uses would be found for lots 

 more structures, and cheered me by throwing my own 

 orchids into my teeth." 



DARWIN'S GREATEST FRIENDS IN THE TIME 

 OF STRESS 



It is interesting to put side by side passages 

 from two letters " written by Darwin to Hooker, 

 one in 1845 at the beginning of their friendship, 



' More Letters, II, p. 380. 



' L. c, I, p. 39. The passages here quoted are put side by side 

 by the editors of this work. 



