Editors’ Table. 821 
Finally, Mr. Spencer makes the following important admission :— 
“This general conclusion brings with it the thought that the 
phrases employed in discussing organic evolution, though conve- 
nient and indeed needful, are liable to mislead us by veiling the 
actual agencies. That which really goes on in every organism is 
the working together of component parts in ways conducing to the 
continuance of their combined actions in presence of things and 
actions outside, some of which tend to subserve and others to 
destroy the combination. The matters and forces in these two 
groups are the sole causes properly so called. The words ‘ natural 
selection’ do not express a cause in the physical seuse. They 
express a mode of co-operation among causes, or rather, to speak 
strictly, they express an effect of this mode of co-operation ” (p. 40). 
Here we have frankly intimated what the Neolamarckian has for 
years insisted on, that the phrase “ natural selection” is not a vera 
causa, but rather expresses the results or effects of the co-operation 
of a number of factors in organic evolution. In the case of too 
many naturalists the dogma or creed of natural selection has, it 
Seems to us, tied their hands, obscured their vision, and prevented 
their seeking by observation and experiment to discover, so far as 
human intelligence can do so, the tangible, genuine, efficient 
actors of organic evolution. 
EDITORS’ TABLE. 
EDITORS: E. D. COPE AND J. S. KINGSLEY. 
The bringing into cultivation of the arid regions of the United 
States would increase the agricultural resources of the nation 
by one-third. The man who should devise a successful 
method of doing this would be one of the benefactors of his 
kind and country. The region to be thus reclaimed includes a wide 
strip extending north and south, east of the Rocky Mountains; a 
large part of the drainage basin of the Rio Grande; the hydro- 
graphic basin of the Great Colorado, and the Great Basin of Utah 
and Nevada, Small portions of all these regions are at present 
