No. 580] ORIGIN OF SINGLE CHARACTERS 



237 



which never have and never will occur in Nature. He 

 may, moreover, never observe at all certain modes of 

 origin and behavior as well as certain properties and 

 qualities of characters which are of the most fundamental 

 importance in relation to his particular field of heredity 

 and hybridizing. 



"While twenty years of observation of the normal and 

 the natural aspects of nature have brought the zoologist 

 and paleontologist somewhat nearer to a conception of the 

 modes of evolution, twenty years of continuous observa- 

 tion of the abnormal and unnatural have landed one of 

 the leading experimentalists, William Bateson, in the 

 state of skepticism and agnosticism expressed in his recent 

 work (p. 248, italics our own) : 22 



The many converging lines of evidence point so clearly to the central 

 fact of the origin of the forms of life by an evolutionary process 

 that we are compelled to accept this deduction, but as to almost all 

 the essential features, whether of cause or mode, by which specific 

 diversity lias become what we perceive it to be, we have to confess an 

 ignorance nearly total. The transformation of masses of population 

 by imperceptible steps guided by selection, is, as most of us now see, 

 so inapplicable to the facts, whether of variation or of specificity., 

 that we can only marvel both at the want of penetration displayed by 



it was made to appear acceptable even for a time. 



If the principle of the continuous and independent 

 movement of each member of a vast colony of single 

 characters is firmly established, as it appears to be 

 through vertebrate and invertebrate paleontology, we 

 must abandon entirely one tradition left by the master 

 mind of Darwin which has permeated the work of all the 

 original Darwinians and Neo-Darwinians, and which is 

 equally strong in the mind of De Vries. Bateson has re- 

 cently maintained this tradition of the origin of " species" 

 from fortuitous saltatory characters in the following lan- 

 guage. 23 



Press, 1913, 250 pp. 



