ANIMAL SENSE PERCEPTIONS. 333 



wild Indians did not equal them in the sharpness of their senses.* 

 On the other hand, as the result of the ' Eeport of the Anthro- 

 pometric Committee, British Association, 1881,' Mr. Roberts 

 stated that the figures gave no support to the belief that savages 

 possess better sight than civilized peoples, and spoke of " the 

 common mistake of travellers in confounding acuteness of vision 

 with the results of special training or education of the faculty of 

 seeing, results which," as he remarked, " are quite as much de- 

 pendent on mental training as in the use of the eyes." As pointed 

 out by Haeckel, our own eyes are subject to the law of divergent 

 adaptation. " If, for example, a naturalist accustoms himself 

 always to use one eye for the microscope . . . then that eye 

 will acquire a power different from that of the other. . . . The 

 one eye will become short-sighted, and better suited for seeing 

 things near at hand ; the other eye becomes, on the contrary, 

 more long-sighted, more acute for looking at an object in the 

 distance. If, on the other hand, the naturalist alternately uses 

 both eyes for the microscope, he will not acquire the short- 

 sightedness of the one eye, and the compensating degree of long 

 sight in the other, which is attained by a wise distribution of 

 these different functions of sight between the two eyes."t And 

 so, even at the risk of being accused of rank Lamarckism, I may 



* Cf. ' Descent of Man,' 2nd ed. pp. 83-4. 



t ' History of Creation,' 4th ed. vol. i. p. 269. 



+ By many evolutionists who advocate Darwinism as sanctioned by 

 Weismannism, it has recently become the vogue to not only decry Lamarck, 

 but to denounce what they consider as the Lamarckian heresy. Not 

 only have his views been condemned and ridiculed, but even his honesty 

 has been called in question. Thus a recent writer, after remarking on the 

 extraordinary coincidence of the independent conception of " Natural Selec- 

 tion" by Darwin and Wallace, cannot adopt the same view as to some 

 coincidences in the writings of Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin ; and although 

 the first named, in his ' Animaux sans Vertebres,' states that his theory is 

 the first that has been presented, this does not satisfy the suspicions of 

 his critic, who writes: — "But if Lamarck borrowed without acknowledg- 

 ment, it would be but a small step further to write the passage in question " 

 ('Nature,' vol. lii. p. 362). Prof. Osborn, in his 'From the Greeks to 

 Darwin,' has examined, discussed, and reduced this imputation to the 

 character of "unproved slander." How different is the verdict of one well 

 able to judge. Huxley writes of " the famous naturalist Lamarck, who 

 possessed a greater acquaintance with the lower forms of life than any man 

 of his day, Cuvier not excepted, and was a good botanist to boot '' (' Collected 



