


DARWINISM. ?) 
AN ANALYSIS BY OBSERVATION AND EXPERIMENT. 
A DIGEST AND PRELIMINARY STATEMENT OF RESULTS, 
\ by WILLIAM LAWRENCE TOWER 
(Carmel-California) 
INTRODUCTION. 
The publication of Darwın’s Hypothesis of the Origin of Species 
by Means of Natural Selection initiated an epoch in the investigation 
and consideration of evolution. The idea of evolution antedated 
DARWIN by many centuries but his Hypothesis of Natural Selection 
was the first of several hypotheses of the method of evolution that 
gained widespread attention and seemed for many years to provide 
a naturalistic explanation as well as a usable working hypothesis. 
The initial effect of DARWIN’s Hypothesis was to providea plausible 
explanation for a vast number of phenomena in the living world 
which previously seemed unrelated and mysterious on the basis 
of any conceptions then in existence, thus bringing some order 
and relationship into knowledge that had been chaotic. 
Popular estimation still associates DARWIN’s name with the 
origination of the idea of evolution but his contribution was the 
Hypothesis of Natural Selection as a method of the origin of 
species and it was instrumental in bringing about an increasing 
acceptance of the idea of evolution, so that the principle of evolution 
has become a generally accepted underlying concept in all depart- 
ments of knowledge. By Darwinism should be understood the 
method of evolution which DARWIN proposed and not the idea 
of evolution, and it is in this sense that the term Darwinism is 

used in this paper. 
ÿ 1) Read at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement 
of Science at Salt Lake City, Utah. July 1922. 
Genetica. 27 
