them together, found that tails invariably decorated the race
as before. I remember hearing Mr. Bernard Shaw comment on this
experiment. He was defending the Lamarckianism of Samuel Butler, who
declared that our heredity was a kind of race-memory, a lapsed
intelligence. "Why," said Mr. Shaw, "did the mice continue to grow
tails? Because they never wanted to have them cut off." But men-folk
are wont to shave off their beards because they want to have them off;
and, amongst people more conservative in their habits than ourselves,
such a custom may persist through numberless generations. Yet who ever
observed the slightest signs of beardlessness being produced in this
way? On the other hand, there are beardless as well as bearded races
in the world; and, by crossing them, you could, doubtless, soon produce
ups and downs in the razor-trade. Only, as Weismann's school would
say, the required variation is in this case spontaneous, that is, comes
entirely of its own accord.

Leaving the question of use-inheritance open, I pass on to say a word
about variation as considered in itself and apart from this doubtful
influence. Weismann holds, that organisms resulting from the union
of two cells are more variable than those produced out of a single
one. On this view, variation depends largely on the laws of the
interaction of the dissimilar characters brought together in
cell-union. But what are these laws? The best that can be said is that
we are getting to know a little more about them every day. Amongst
other lines of inquiry, the so-called Mendelian experiments promise
to clear up much that is at present dark.

The development of the individual that results from such cell-union
is no mere mixture or addition, but a process of selective organization.
To put it very absurdly, one does not find a pair of two-legged parents
having a child with legs as big as the two sets of legs together, or
with four legs, two of them of one shape and two of another. In other
words, of the possibilities contributed by the father and mother, some
are taken and some are left in the case of any one child. Further,
different children will represent different selections from amongst
the germinal elements. Mendelism, by the way, is especially concerned
to find out the law according to which the different types of
organization are distributed between the offspring. Each child,
meanwhile, is a unique individual, a living whole with an organization
of its