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ition, 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 otherwise inexplicable facts. These examples of incongruous thoughts I give to prepare the way; and will now go on to examine the chief propositions which the quoted passage contains. The Duke of Argyll says that "heredity is the central idea of natural selection." Now it would, I think, be concluded that those who possess the central idea of a thing have some consciousness of the thing. Yet men have possessed the idea of heredity for any number of generations and have been quite unconscious of natural selection. Clearly the statement is misleading. It might just as truly be said that the occurrence of structural variations in organisms is the central idea of natural selection. And it might just as truly be said that the action of external agencies in killing some individuals and fostering others is the central idea of natural selection. No such assertions are correct. The process has three factors--heredity, variation, and external action--any one of which being absent, the process ceases. The conception contains three corresponding ideas, and if any one be struck out, the conception cannot be framed. No one of them is the central idea, but they are co-essential ideas. From the erroneous belief that "heredity is the central idea of natural selection" the Duke of Argyll draws the conclusion, consequently erroneous, that "natural selection includes and covers all the causes which can possibly operate through inheritance." Had he considered the cases which, in the _Principles of Biology_, I have cited to il
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