Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/793

Rh Verification of the reasons above given for the paucity of this direct evidence is yielded by contemplation of it, for it is observable that the cases named are cases which, from one or other cause, have thrust themselves on observation. They justify the suspicion that it is not because such cases are rare that many of them cannot be cited, but simply because they are mostly unobtrusive, and to be found only by that deliberate search which nobody makes. I say nobody, but I am wrong. Successful search has been made by one whose competence as an observer is beyond question, and whose testimony is less liable than that of all others to any bias toward the conclusion that such inheritance takes place. I refer to the author of the Origin of Species.

Now-a-days most naturalists are more Darwinian than Mr. Darwin himself. I do not mean that their beliefs in organic evolution are more decided; though I shall be supposed to mean this by the mass of readers, who identify Mr. Darwin's great contribution to the theory of organic evolution, with the theory of organic evolution itself, and even with the theory of evolution at large. But I mean that the particular factor which he first recognized as having played so immense a part in organic evolution, has come to be regarded by his followers as the sole factor, though it was not so regarded by him. It is true that he apparently rejected altogether the causal agencies alleged by earlier inquirers. In the Historical Sketch prefixed to the later editions of his Origin of Species (p. xiv, note), he writes:—"It is curious how largely my grandfather. Dr. Erasmus Darwin, anticipated the views and erroneous grounds of opinion of Lamarck in his 'Zoonomia' (vol. i, pp. 500-510), published in 1794." And since, among the views thus referred to, was the view that changes of structure in organisms arise by the inheritance of functionally-produced changes, Mr. Darwin seems, by the above sentence, to have implied his disbelief in such inheritance. But he did not mean to imply this; for his belief in it as a cause of evolution, if not an important cause, is proved by many passages in his works. In the first chapter of the Origin of Species (p. 11 of the first edition), he says respecting the inherited effects of habit, that "with animals the increased use or disuse of parts has had a marked influence;" and he gives as instances the changed relative weights of the wing bones and leg bones of the wild duck and the domestic duck, "the great and inherited development of the udders in cows and goats," and the drooping ears of various domestic animals. Here are other passages taken from the latest edition of the work.

"I think there can be no doubt that use in our domestic animals has strengthened and enlarged certain parts, and disuse diminished them; and that such modifications are inherited" (p. 108). [And on the following pages he gives five farther example of such effects.] "Habit in producing constitutional peculiarities and use in strengthening and disuse in weakening and diminishing organs,