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THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. LI 



ontologists, taxonomists and ecologists in favor of La- 

 marckian principles, in spite of the fact that their evi- 

 dence is circumstantial. They take a comprehensive view 

 of the actual conditions that exist among organisms, 

 which is impossible to the experimentalist. It will not do 

 simply to say that the manifest convergence of analogous 

 organs in all parts of the organic world, or the wonderful 

 adaptations of the social insects may he explained in some 

 other ivay. Of course there may be other explanations 

 for these phenomena; but until more satisfactory ex- 

 planations are forthcoming it is rightfully a custom in 

 science that the adequate interpretation at hand should 

 be accepted. 



On the other hand it is equally wrong for the ardent 

 devotees of Lamarckism to clutch at every isolated case, 

 every inadequate and abortive experiment, when judicial 

 consideration shows not a single unassailable instance of 

 the inheritance of a somatic modification. Many of these 

 experiments have a direct bearing on bud-variation, and 

 I shall attempt to show where they lead us. 



1. Inheritance of Mutilations.— The most radical La- 

 marckians of the present day only go so far as to sup- 

 pose that mutilations are inherited on very rare occa- 

 sions—and they are always zoologists. Ethnology has 

 furnished us with so many histories of mutilations of 

 ears, of lips, of feet, of reproductive organs, long con- 

 tinued in the folkways of a people, that new laboratory 

 experiments have been deserving of the ridicule they 

 have received. Botanists have seldom had any delusions 

 on the subject. Plants are so continually mutilated in 

 the buffetings they receive during life, with no resulf in 

 the next generation, that the non-inheritance of the effects 

 of such injuries is taken as a matter of course. Yet there 

 is occasionally one whose reason fails at the critical 

 tnomont, and who holds that cuttings from the chrys- 

 anthonnmi with tlio Inrgo flower rosultiug from the re- 

 moval of Intornl l)rnrichos, will produce larger flowers in 

 the next gonoration than will an untreated sister plant. 

 If not this, some equally indefensible doctrine. 



