s explanation, and one of the favourite sandbanks in
which this particular kind of human ostrich plunges its head is
"Nature." "Nature does this," and "Nature does that," forgetting
entirely the fact that "Nature" is a mere personification and means
either chance-medley or a Creator, according to the old dilemma. There
is a very curious example of this inability or unwillingness to
admit--perhaps even to understand--the force of this argument exhibited
by those to whom one would suppose that it would come home with
overpowering force: I mean, of course, the Mendelians.

The most learned of these, and one of the most open-minded of men,
hints in one place that though he does not think it necessary himself to
believe it, yet it might at least be suggested that, if in a certain
organism we find things so placed that a certain combination is bound to
emerge in a certain generation, such a state of affairs might have been
prearranged. Now, if it was prearranged, the awful fact emerges that
there must have been an arranger; in other words, a creative power. This
explanation is taboo in certain circles. But one may reasonably ask,
"What then?" Is it really suggested that these orderly sets of
occurrences may occur not once or twice only but thousands and thousands
of times, and this may all happen by chance? A very distant acquaintance
with the mathematics of probability will show that this is a wholly
untenable theory. We are generally answered by some purely verbal
explanation, like the personification of "Nature" already alluded to.

Thus, in a recent discussion on inheritance in a Presidential Address to
the British Association, to which I have already alluded, the writer
with whose explanation I have just been dealing states that he thinks it
"unlikely" that the factors of inheritance are "in any simple or literal
sense material particles," and proceeds thus: "I suspect rather that
their properties depend on some phenomenon of arrangement." Now, in the
first place, this is no explanation at all, for the mechanism of
inheritance must be either material or immaterial. If there is a
phenomenon of "arrangement" there must be something to be "arranged,"
and this something can hardly be other than material if it is to be
"arranged" at all. But let that pass. What is far more important is to
remember that if a thing is to be "arranged" there must be somebody to
"arrange" it, for chance-medley cannot "arrange" anything in an orde