Page:George Archdall Reid 1896 The present evolution of man.djvu/118

106 this theory was not before Mr. Spencer I need not discuss it further here, beyond saying that it offers an explanation why "the mere cessation of selection should cause decrease of an organ irrespective of the direct effects of disuse."

Other parts of the passage quoted above call for more detailed criticism. Mr. Spencer writes—"And now, before leaving this question, let me remark on the strange proposition which has to be defended by those who deny the dwindling of organs by disuse. Their proposition amounts to this—that for a hundred generations an inactive organ may be partially denuded of blood all through life, and yet in the hundredth generation will be produced of just the same size as in the first." And this he writes but a few sentences after—"Clearer conceptions of these matters would be reached if, instead of thinking in abstract terms, the physiological processes concerned were brought into the foreground."

Where shall we find a more daring misuse of "abstract terms," or a more glaring disregard of "the physiological processes concerned," than in the words "for a hundred generations an inactive organ may be partially denuded of blood all through life, and yet in the hundredth generation will be produced of just the same size as in the first"? The words imply that the same organ is "denuded of blood for a hundred generations" whereas the truth is that a hundred similar organs in a hundred successive generations are denuded of blood, which organs are only connected with preceding and succeeding like organs through germ cells, which are not in any way the products of the organs, but are co-descendants with the cells of the organs from a very remote cell-ancestry; at any rate the germ cells have not been proved to be products in part of the organs, and all theories as yet formulated