1897.) The Limits of Organice Selection. 949 
Acquired modifications thus helps on congenital change by 
giving time for the necessary variations in many directions to 
be selected, and we have here another answer to the supposed 
difficulty as to the necessity of many coincident variations in 
order to bring about any effective advance of the organism. 
In one year favorable variations of one kind are selected and 
individual modifications in other directions enable them to be 
utilized; in Professor Lloyd Morgan’s words: ‘ Modification 
as such is not inherited, but is the condition under which con- 
genital variations are favored and given time to get a hold on 
the organism, and are thus enabled by degrees to reach the 
fully adaptive level? The same result will be produced by 
Professor Weissman’s recent suggestion of ‘ germinal selection,’ 
so that it now appears as if all the theoretical objections to the ‘ ad- 
equacy of natural selection’ have been theoretically answered.” 
(Italics our own.) 
Alfred Wallace thus accepts this new phase of the natural 
selection theory and maintains that it removes the last of the 
theoretical objections to the adequacy of that theory. I donot 
wish to be understood as taking such a sanguine view ; I rather 
maintain the conservative position which I have held for 
many years in regard to the adequacy of both the Lamarckian 
and Darwinian theories. 
Moreover, in course of discussion of this subject with my 
friends Professors Lloyd Morgan, Baldwin and Poulton, a 
very fundamental difference of opinion becomes apparent; for 
they agree in believing that the power of plastic modification 
to new circumstances, or what the Rev. Dr. Henslow has termed 
“self-adaptation,” is in itself a result of natural selection. In 
other words they hold that natural selection has established 
in organisms this power of invariable response to new. 
conditions, which, in the vast majority of cases is essentially 
adaptive. I disagree with this assumption in toto, maintain- 
ing that this plastic modification is, so far as we know an in- 
herent power or function of protoplasm. This view, I under- 
stand, is also held by Driesch, E. B. Wilson, T. H. Morgan 
and probably by many others. The only cases in which self- 
adaptation may be demonstrated as produced by natural se- 
