not have been effected by "simultaneous fortunate spontaneous variations." But this difficulty is fully disposed of by the facts of simultaneous variation adduced in our third chapter, and has also been specially considered in Chapter VI, p. 127. The best answer to this objection may, perhaps, be found in the fact that the very thing said to be impossible by variation and natural selection has been again and again effected by variation and artificial selection. During the process of formation of such breeds as the greyhound or the bulldog, of the race-horse and carthorse, of the fantail pigeon or the otter-sheep, many co-ordinate adjustments have been produced; and no difficulty has occurred, whether the change has been effected by a single variation—as in the last case named—or by slow steps, as in all the others. It seems to be forgotten that most animals have such a surplus of vitality and strength for all the ordinary occasions of life that any slight superiority in one part can be at once utilised; while the moment any want of balance occurs, variations in the insufficiently developed parts will be selected to bring back the harmony of the whole organisation. The fact that, in all domestic animals, variations do occur, rendering them swifter or stronger, larger or smaller, stouter or slenderer, and that such variations can be separately selected and accumulated for man's purposes, is sufficient to render it certain that similar or even greater changes may be effected by natural selection, which, as Darwin well remarks, "acts on every internal organ, on every shade of constitututional difference, on the whole machinery of life." The difficulty as to co-adaptation of parts by variation and natural selection appears to me, therefore, to be a wholly imaginary difficulty which has no place whatever in the operations of nature.
Direct Action of the Environment.
Mr. Spencer's last objection to the wide scope given by Darwinians to the agency of natural selection is, that organisms are acted upon by the environment, which produces in them definite changes, and that these changes in the individual are transmitted by inheritance, and thus become increased in successive generations. That such changes are produced in the individual there is ample evidence, but that they are in-
