220 GEOEGE JOHN EOMANES I88I- 



on mine. But I think he deserves great credit for 

 nowhere chuckhng. From the first he has been con- 

 sistent in holding natural selection the sole factor of 

 organic evolution — leaving no room for sexual selec- 

 tion, inheritance of acquired characters, &c., &c. 

 And now that he had lived to see an important 

 body of evolutionists adopting this view, there must 

 have been a strong temptation to ' I always told you 

 so.' Yet there is nowhere any note of this, or even 

 so much as an allusion to his previous utterances on 

 the subject. 



To E. B. PouUon, Esq. 



Geanies, Eoss-shire : November 2, 1889. 



My dear Poulton, — Continuing our antipodal cor- 

 respondence, and taking the points in your last letter 

 seriatim, I quite saw that your theory of repair was 

 ' the logical outcome of Weismann's ' (being, in fact, a 

 direct application of his views on phylogeny to the 

 case of repair) ; but I did not know whether the out- 

 come had been traced by him or by yourself. Now, I 

 understand, I may allude to it as yours. Again, what 

 I meant about regeneration of entire limbs, &c., was 

 that, to meet such cases, your diagram would require 

 modification in the way that you now suggest. Has 

 it occurred to you as an argument in favour of this 

 suggestion (i.e. that the ' potentiahty ' of somatic 

 germ-plasm may in such cases be arrested in its pro- 

 cess of ontogenetic diffusion), that Darwin has shown, 

 or at least alleged, that all such cases may be traced 

 to special adaptation to special needs, dangers, &c. — 



