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CHAELES B. WARRING, M.A., PH.D., ON 



least, wholesale, and so much so that individual variations could 

 have no influence upon individual survival. We may not affirm the 

 old doctrine of repeated catastrophes, but surely many of the great 

 extinctions of floras and faunas of the world have been quite as vast 

 as the catastrophes formerly supposed, although they have been 

 obviously gradual in most cases. We have but to look at the face 

 of a chalk cliff some hundred feet high, literally composed of the 

 skeletons of the Foraminifera, Polycistina, and Diatoms with their 

 debris, or the " Atlantic Ooze " of to-day, going through the 

 experience of the chalk of the Cretaceous period, or to study a bed 

 of Nummulitic limestone some thousands of feet in thickness, and to 

 examine a piece of this from the Great Pyramid, and find num- 

 mulites of all sizes from a split pea to a florin ; we have only to 

 consider these gigantic evidences of organism entombed en masse by 

 the physical agencies concerned in geological exterminations, to see 

 that individual fitness to survive can have had, in these vast masses 

 of organisms, no part or lot in the matter. What individual fitness, 

 we may ask, determined the death or survival of the myriads of 

 club-mosses and tree-ferns which went to make up the coal-measures 

 of the world 1 They perished evidently en masse, and it may be 

 assumed that such of them as happened to live to propagate their 

 species with variations suited to new environments were directly 

 modified by the changing environments. 



We have heard of the heroic Sixth Brigade of the Japanese 

 before Port Arthur, making one of the most desperate assaults ever 

 made by infantry on powerful forts, going into action with 5,000 men, 

 of whom 400 alone remained when the forts were taken, and of the 

 Colonel of the 1st Regiment, the hero of fifty-seven combats, who 

 habitually exposed himself in the firing line, and who according to 

 the usual calculations should have been long ago dead and buried, 

 and we are forced to admit that no more did the colonel survive 

 because he was fitted to survive than did the 4,600 of the Sixth 

 Brigade fall because they were unfitted to survive under the 

 remorseless extermination of shell fire and bullets. This, I submit, 

 is parallel to the wholesale and impartial destruction of masses of 

 organisms of an early and lowly class, though not all of that 

 unicellular group in which alone does Weismann fail to bring in 

 selection as the deus ex machind. 



This aspect of the subject gives " geological exterminations " a 



