Page:Darwinism by Alfred Wallace 1889.djvu/446

 these American evolutionists have departed very widely from the views of Mr. Darwin, and in place of the well-established causes and admitted laws to which he appeals have introduced theoretical conceptions which have not yet been tested by experiments or facts, as well as metaphysical conceptions which are incapable of proof. And when they come to illustrate these views by an appeal to palaeontology or morphology, we find that a far simpler and more complete explanation of the facts is afforded by the established principles of variation and natural selection. The confidence with which these new ideas are enunciated, and the repeated assertion that without them Darwinism is powerless to explain the origin of organic forms, renders it necessary to bestow a little more time on the explanations they give us of well-known phenomena with which, they assert, other theories are incompetent to grapple.

As examples of use producing structural change, Mr. Cope adduces the hooked and toothed beaks of the falcons and the butcher-birds, and he argues that the fact of these birds belonging to widely different groups proves that similarity of use has produced a similar structural result. But no attempt is made to show any direct causal connection between the use of a bill to cut or tear flesh and the development of a tooth on the mandible. Such use might conceivably strengthen the bill or increase its size, but not cause a special tooth-like outgrowth which was not present in the ancestral thrush-like forms of the butcher-bird. On the other hand, it is clear that any variations of the bill tending towards a hook or tooth would give the possessor some advantage in seizing and tearing its prey, and would thus be preserved and increased by natural selection. Again, Mr. Cope urges the effects of a supposed "law of polar or centrifugal growth" to counteract a tendency to unsymmetrical growth, where one side of the body is used more than the other. But the undoubted hurtfulness of want of symmetry in many important actions or functions would rapidly eliminate any such tendency. When, however, it has