Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/163

Rh factor; and it is surprising that this assumption should have been made after reading the second of the two articles criticised, in which this factor omitted from the first is dealt with; this omitted third factor being the direct physico-chemical action of the medium on the organism. Such a thought as that which the Duke of Argyll ascribes to me, is so incongruous with the beliefs I have in many places expressed that the ascription of it never occurred to me as possible.

Lower down on the same page are some other sentences having personal implications, which I must dispose of before going into the general question. The Duke says "it is more than doubtful whether any value attaches to the new factor with which he [I] desires to supplement it" [natural selection]; and he thinks it "unaccountable" that I "should make so great a fuss about so small a matter as the effect of use and disuse of particular organs as a separate and a newly recognised factor in the development of varieties." I do not suppose that the Duke of Argyll intended to cast upon me the disagreeable imputation, that I claim as new that which all who are even slightly acquainted with the facts know to be anything rather than new. But his words certainly do this. How he should have thus written in spite of the extensive knowledge of the matter which he evidently has, and how he should have thus written in presence of the evidence contained in the articles he criticises, I cannot understand. Naturalists, and multitudes besides naturalists, know that the hypothesis which I am represented as putting forward as new is much older than the hypothesis of natural selection—goes back at least as far as Dr. Erasmus Darwin. My purpose was to bring into the foreground again a factor which has, I think, been of late years improperly ignored; to show that Mr. Darwin recognised this factor in an increasing degree as he grew older (by showing which I should have thought I sufficiently excluded the supposition that I brought it forward as new); to give further evidence that this factor is in operation; to show there are numerous phenomena which cannot be interpreted without it; and to argue that if proved operative in any cases, it may be inferred that it is operative on all structures having active functions.

Strangely enough, this passage in which I am represented as implying novelty in a doctrine which I have merely sought to emphasise and extend, is immediately succeeded by a passage in which the Duke of Argyll himself represents the doctrine as being familiar and well established:

That organs thus enfeebled [i. e. by persistent disuse] are transmitted by inheritance to offspring in a like condition of functional and structural decline, is a correlated physiological doctrine not generally disputed. The converse case—