inate
point to his followers. But in his Pangenesis hypothesis he has given us
the clue for a close study and ultimate elucidation of the subject under
discussion.

V. HEREDITY AND VARIATION IN MODERN LIGHTS. By W. Bateson, M.A., F.R.S.

Professor of Biology in the University of Cambridge.

Darwin's work has the property of greatness in that it may be admired
from more aspects than one. For some the perception of the principle of
Natural Selection stands out as his most wonderful achievement to which
all the rest is subordinate. Others, among whom I would range myself,
look up to him rather as the first who plainly distinguished, collected,
and comprehensively studied that new class of evidence from which
hereafter a true understanding of the process of Evolution may be
developed. We each prefer our own standpoint of admiration; but I think
that it will be in their wider aspect that his labours will most command
the veneration of posterity.

A treatise written to advance knowledge may be read in two moods. The
reader may keep his mind passive, willing merely to receive the impress
of the writer's thought; or he may read with his attention strained and
alert, asking at every instant how the new knowledge can be used in a
further advance, watching continually for fresh footholds by which to
climb higher still. Of Shelley it has been said that he was a poet
for poets: so Darwin was a naturalist for naturalists. It is when his
writings are used in the critical and more exacting spirit with which
we test the outfit for our own enterprise that we learn their full value
and strength. Whether we glance back and compare his performance with
the efforts of his predecessors, or look forward along the course which
modern research is disclosing, we shall honour most in him not the
rounded merit of finite accomplishment, but the creative power by which
he inaugurated a line of discovery endless in variety and extension.
Let us attempt thus to see his work in true perspective between the past
from which it grew, and the present which is its consequence. Darwin
attacked the problem of Evolution by reference to facts of three
classes: Variation; Heredity; Natural Selection. His work was not as the
laity suppose, a sudden and unheralded revelation, but the first fruit
of a long and hitherto barren controversy. The occurrence of variation
from type, and the hereditary transmission of such variation had of
course been long fami