﻿316 Darwin, and after Darwin. 



characters are more apt to give rise to genera, families, &c, 

 than are species which do not present such characters. 



The next passage which Mr. Wallace quotes, with his 

 comments thereon, is as follows. The italics are his. 



"'Thus a large yet undefined extension may safely be given 

 to the direct and indirect results of natural selection ; but I 

 now admit, after reading the essay of Nageli on plants, and 

 the remarks by various authors with respect to animals, more 

 especially those recently made by Professor Broca, that in 

 the earlier editions of my Origin of Species I perhaps attri- 

 buted too much to the action of natural selection, or the sur- 

 vival of the fittest. I have altered the fifth edition of the 

 Origin so as to confine my remarks to adaptive changes of 

 structure ; but I am convinced, from the light gained during 

 even the last few years, that very many structures which now 

 appear to be useless, will hereafter be proved to be useful, 

 and will therefore come within the range of natural selection. 

 Nevertheless I did not formerly consider sufficiently the exis- 

 tence of structures which, as far as we can at present judge, 

 are neither beneficial nor injurious ; and this I believe to be 

 one of the greatest oversights as yet detected in my work.' 



Now it is to be remarked that neither in these passages 

 nor in any of the other less distinct expressions of opinion on 

 this question, does Darwin ever admit that " specific characters " 

 — that is, the particular characters which serve to distinguish 

 one species from another — are ever useless, much less that 

 11 a large proportion of them " are so, as Mr. Romanes makes 

 him "freely acknowledge." On the other hand, in the passage 

 which I have italicised he strongly expresses his view that 

 much of what we suppose to be useless is due to our ignor- 

 ance ; and as I hold myself that, as regards many of the sup- 

 posed useless characters, this is the true explanation, it may 

 be well to give a brief sketch of the progress of knowledge 

 in transferring characters from the one category to the other 1 ." 



It is needless to continue this quotation, because of course 

 no one is disputing that an enormous number of specific 



1 Darwinism, p. 132. 



