VARIATIONS, DUE TO REVERSION. 101 



fact that, instead of there having been evolution in 

 the past, under nature, there has been great degen- 

 eration, which is the very antithesis to evolution. 

 Fancy his assumed, slight variation, arising once in 

 "the course of thousands of generations," and de- 

 pendent upon the fitful action of Natural Selection 

 for its preservation, contending against the wide-spread 

 degeneration which Darwin shows! And when the 

 variation has arisen, and is preserved, who is to tell, 

 whether or not, it is only a lost character regained? 



On page 449, Vol. ii, Animals and Plants, &c, 

 Darwin says, that Herbert Spencer's "Principles of 

 Biology" "are not brought to bear on reversion; and 

 this is unintelligible to me." It is not unintelligible to 

 Herbert Spencer. He is a wiser man, in his genera- 

 tion, than is Darwin. He had his own sound reasons 

 for not bringing his- principles to bear on reversion. 

 Spencer doubtless saw that his synthesis would be 

 shattered in heaps over his head, by his own act, 

 did he not steer clear of all mention of Reversion. 

 Spencer's synthesis requires that variations should be 

 regarded as wholly ultimate facts, inexplicable by any 

 law save the one which Spencer devised for the nonce, 

 viz., "the instability of the homogeneous." Were it 

 admitted, by Spencer, that the varying individuals 

 have degenerated, and that the appearance, in any 

 individual, of characters similar to the ones which 

 such individual's progenitors lost, must be ascribed 

 to the law of reversion, the inevitable outcome must 

 have been, some day, the complete exposition of the 

 fallacy upon which the synthesis rests. The theory, 



