Page:Darwinism by Alfred Wallace 1889.djvu/199

VII prejudicial effect. If, for example, five per cent of each form thus varied so as to be infertile with the other form, the result would be hardly perceptible, because the individuals which formed cross-unions and produced hybrids would constitute a very small portion of the whole species; and the hybrid offspring, being at a disadvantage in the struggle for existence and being themselves infertile, would soon die out, while the much more numerous fertile portion of the two forms would increase rapidly, and furnish a sufficient number of pure-bred offspring of each form to take the place of the somewhat inferior hybrids between them whenever the struggle for existence became severe. We must suppose that the normal fertile forms would transmit their fertility to their progeny, and the few infertile forms their infertility; but the latter would necessarily lose half their proper increase by the sterility of their hybrid offspring whenever they crossed with the other form, and when they bred with their own form the tendency to sterility would die out except in the very minute proportion of the five per cent (one-twentieth) that chance would lead to pair together. Under these circumstances the incipient sterility between the two forms would rapidly be eliminated, and could never rise much above the numbers which were produced by sporadic variation each year.

It was, probably, by a consideration of some such case as this that Mr. Darwin came to the conclusion that infertility arising between incipient species could not be increased by natural selection; and this is the more likely, as he was always disposed to minimise both the frequency and the amount even of structural variations.

We have yet to notice another mode of action of natural selection in favouring and perpetuating any infertility that may arise between two incipient species. If several distinct species are undergoing modification at the same time and in the same area, to adapt them to some new conditions that have arisen there, then any species in which the structural or colour differences that have arisen between it and its varieties or close allies were correlated with infertility of the crosses between them, would have an advantage over the corresponding varieties of other species in which there was no such