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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



slowly grew worse, underwent evolution against them. The voyage of 

 Columbus began their introduction to the western hemisphere, the 

 inhabitants of which are everywhere disappearing owing to their inability 

 to achieve at once an evolution which the peoples of the old world 

 achieved only after the lapse of ages and at the cost of millions of lives. 



"In times now far remote in the history of civilised peoples the 

 sword was the principal means for digging deep the foundations of 

 permanent empires. Its place was taken by a more efficient instrument. 

 A migrating race, armed with a new and deadly disease and with high 

 powers of resisting it, possesses a terrible weapon of offence. But now 

 disease has spread over the whole world, and so is losing its power of 

 building empires. The long era of the great migrations of the human 

 race, of the great conquests, is closing fast." 



The author insists that the true distinction between instinct and 

 reason lies in the fact that the latter is founded on memory, whereas the 

 former is not. Thus a caterpillar, which is guided by instinct, does not 

 learn to spin its cocoon ; but the man, who is guided by reason must 

 learn to build his house. Comparatively speaking, man has very little 

 instinct, but is compensated by the immense range and amplitude of his 

 memory. Compare what is remembered by the dog, for instance, with all 

 that is learnt by his master, including the words of a language and all 

 that is transmitted by one generation of men to the next by language. 

 The author believes, therefore, that many racial mental differences, which 

 are popularly believed to be innate, are due to nurture, not to nature. 

 Birth counts for very little, education for very much, in the case of the 

 average human being. 



A variation must be progressive or retrogressive. The former implies 

 a complete recapitulation of the parental development plus an addition ; 

 the latter an incomplete recapitulation. Since every individual from the 

 beginning recapitulated (with variations) the development cf the parent, 

 it follows of logical necessity that the development of the individual is a 

 recapitulation (with additions and omissions due to ancestral variations) 

 of the life-history of the race. Every species that consists of males and 

 females is dimorphic as regards the sexual characters. The inheritance 

 of these sexual differences is alternative — that is, only one set of characters 

 appears in the individual, the other set being transmitted in a latent con- 

 dition to offspring. The inheritance of non-sexual differences, on the 

 other hand, is, as a rule, not alternative. It is either blended or exclusive. 

 An example of blended inheritance is seen in the mulatto ; an example of 

 exclusive inheritance is seen when one parent has a mole on the face and 

 the children and descendants all follow after the other who has none. 

 Sexual differences between parents are considerable ; non- sexual differ- 

 ences, as a rule, are inconsiderable. When, however, the latter are con- 

 siderable they tend to be transmitted alternatively like sexual differences. 

 Hence the Mendelian phenomena, which, therefore, according to the 

 author, are merely anomalies of sexual reproduction. It will be seen 

 that, while not denying the existence of these phenomena, he denies 

 biological importance to them. The function of sex according to him is 

 the elimination of useless progressive variations — e.g. a mole. Blending 

 itself is a form of retrogression, since the peculiarities of both parents are 



