Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/185

 animals, its effects are in increasing degrees involved with those produced by inheritance of acquired characters; until, in animals of complex structures, inheritance of acquired characters becomes an important, if not the chief, cause of evolution. We have seen that natural selection can not work any changes in organisms save such as conduce in considerable degrees, directly or indirectly, to the multiplication of the stirp; whence failure to account for various changes ascribed to it. And we have seen that it yields no explanation of the co-adaptation of co-operative parts, even when the co-operation is relatively simple, and still less when it is complex. On the other hand, we see that if, along with the transmission of generic and specific structures, there tend to be transmitted modifications arising in a certain way, there is a strong a priori probability that there tend to be transmitted modifications arising in all ways. We have a number of facts confirming this inference, and showing that acquired characters are inherited—as large a number as can be expected, considering the difficulty of observing them and the absence of search. And then to these facts may be added the facts with which this essay set out, concerning the distribution of tactual discriminativeness. While we saw that these are inexplicable by survival of the fittest, we saw that they are clearly explicable as resulting from the inheritance of acquired characters. And here let it be added that this conclusion is conspicuously warranted by one of the methods of inductive logic, known as the method of concomitant variations. For throughout the whole series of gradations in perceptive power, we saw that the amount of the effect is proportionate to the amount of the alleged cause.—Contemporary Review.



OMPARING the stone age of the New World with that of the Old, an important point of difference comes at once into view. The American race is distinguished in culture from all other savages by the possession and use of an implement to which nothing analogous is found among the prehistoric relics of the Eastern hemisphere. That implement is the tobacco pipe.

Among the aborigines of America the use of tobacco was widely prevalent. The practice of cigar-smoking was observed by the companions of Columbus on his first voyage; and m the brilliant series of discoveries which followed the great admiral s achievement, as well as in the slower process of exploration and colonization, the pipe, the cigar, and the snuff mortar revealed 