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should have gladly used in support of my argument had they been available; but unfortunately they are not.

On the next page of the Duke of Argyll's article (page 145), occurs a passage which I must quote at length before I can deal effectually with its various statements.^[1] It runs as follows:

But if natural selection is a mere phrase, vague enough and wide enough to cover any number of the physical causes concerned in ordinary generation, then the whole of Mr. Spencer's laborious argument in favor of his "other factor" becomes an argument worse than superfluous. It is wholly fallacious in assuming that this "factor" and "natural selection" are at all exclusive of, or even separate from, each other. The factor thus assumed to be new is simply one of the subordinate cases of heredity. But heredity is the central idea of natural selection. Therefore natural selection includes and covers all the causes which can possibly operate through inheritance. There is thus no difficulty whatever in referring it to the same one factor whose solitary dominion Mr. Spencer has plucked up courage to dispute. He will never succeed in shaking its dictatorship by such a small rebellion. His little contention is like some bit of Bumbledom setting up for Home Rule—some parochial vestry claiming independence of a universal empire. It pretends to set up for itself in some fragment of an idea. But here is not even a fragment to boast of or to stand up for. His new factor in organic evolution has neither independence nor novelty. Mr. Spencer is able to quote himself as having mentioned it in his Principles of Biology, published some twenty years ago; and by a careful ransacking of Darwin he shows that the idea was familiar to and admitted by him at least in his last edition of the Origin of Species. . . . Darwin was a man so much wiser than all his followers, &c.

Had there not been the Duke of Argyll's signature to the article, I could scarcely have believed that this passage was written by him. Remembering that on reading his article in the preceding number of this Review, I was struck by the extent of knowledge, clearness of discrimination, and power of exposition, displayed in it, I can scarcely understand how there has come from the same pen a passage in which none of these traits are exhibited. Even one wholly unacquainted with the subject may see in the last two sentences of the above extract, how strangely its propositions are strung together. While in the first of them I am represented as bringing forward a "new factor," I am in the second represented as saying that I mentioned it twenty years ago! In the same breath I am described as claiming it as new and asserting it as old! So, again, the uninstructed reader, on comparing the first words of the extract with the last, will be surprised on seeing in a scientific article statements so manifestly wanting in precision. If "natural selection is a mere phrase," how can Mr. Darwin, who thought it explained the origin of species, be regarded as wise? Surely it must be more than a mere phrase if it is the key to so many

1. "Popular Science Monthly," vol. xxxiii, p. 58.