Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/779

Rh or that limb, the muscles moving it may be augmented or diminished in bulk; and, if there is inheritance of changes so wrought, the limb may, in course of generations, be rendered larger or smaller. But changes in the arrangements or attachments of muscles can not be thus accounted for. It is found, especially at the extremities, that the relations of tendons to bones and to one another are not always the same. Variations in their modes of connexion may occasionally prove advantageous, and may thus become established. Here again, then, we have a class of structural changes to which Mr. Darwin's hypothesis gives us the key, and to which there is no other key.

Once more there are the phenomena of mimicry. Perhaps in a more striking way than any others, these show how traits which seem inexplicable are explicable as due to the more frequent survival of individuals that have varied in favorable ways. We are enabled to understand such marvellous simulations as those of the leaf-insect, those of beetles which "resemble glittering dew-drops upon the leaves;" those of caterpillars, which, when asleep, stretch themselves out so as to look like twigs. And we are shown how there have arisen still more astonishing imitations—those of one insect by another. As Mr. Bates has proved, there are cases in which a species of butterfly, rendered so unpalatable to insectivorous birds by its disagreeable taste that they will not catch it, is simulated in its colors and markings by a species which is structurally quite different—so simulated that even a practised entomologist is liable to be deceived: the explanation being that an original slight resemblance, leading to occasional mistakes on the part of birds, was increased generation after generation by the more frequent escape of the most-like individuals, until the likeness became thus great.

But now, recognizing in full this process brought into clear view by Mr. Darwin, and traced out by him with so much care and skill, can we conclude that, taken alone, it accounts for organic evolution? has the natural selection of favorable variations been the sole factor? On critically examining the evidence, we shall find reason to think that it by no means explains all that has to be explained. Omitting for the present any consideration of a factor which may be distinguished as primordial, it may be contended that the above-named factor alleged by Dr. Erasmus Darwin and by Lamarck, must be recognized as a co-operator. Utterly inadequate to explain the major part of the facts as is the hypothesis of the inheritance of functionally produced modifications, yet there is a minor part of the facts, very extensive though less, which must be ascribed to this cause.

When discussing the question more than twenty years ago (Principles of Biology, § 166), I instanced the decreased size of the jaws in the civilized races of mankind, as a change not accounted for by the natural selection of favorable variations; since no one of the