ly performed actions
and habits. The life-story of many wasps, of the various ants,--someone
has called the brain of the ant the most wonderful speck of protoplasm
in the world,--and of the insects generally, is bound up with instincts
that partly interlock marvellously with the life-story of plants, and
which are, even viewed in themselves, the greatest wonders of creation.
The questions insistently call for an answer: How could these instincts
preserve the animal when they were still in an incipient, undeveloped
state? How could they arise through natural selection (which is simply
_accident,_ of course), at all? Darwin says that there are instincts
"almost identically the same in animals so remote in the scale of
Nature, that we cannot account for their similarity by inheritance from
a common progenitor, and consequently must believe that they were
independently acquired through natural selection." Again he says "Many
instincts are so wonderful that their development will probably appear
to the reader a difficulty sufficient to overcome my whole theory."

And here, in the vernacular of the day, we would depose that Mr. Darwin
_"said something."_

CHAPTER SEVEN.
Heredity.

The subject of heredity is intimately bound up with the evolutionary
hypothesis and, it must be admitted, creates a new difficulty for the
acceptance of the theory. Indeed, the laws of heredity, so far as
understood, appear to contradict the theory of Lamarck and Darwin at a
vital point, if not at _the_ vital point of the entire structure raised
in the _"Origin of Species."_ It is necessary in order to appreciate the
strength of this objection, to recall once more the outstanding features
of the hypothesis by which scientists have attempted to account for the
variety of living forms. The various theories of organic evolution,
whether Lamarckian, neo-Lamarckian, or Darwinian, are based upon the
assumption that animals and plants have a tendency to perpetuate by
transmission to offspring a variation which has proven useful as an aid
to the particular species in its struggle for existence. We have just
discussed, in the chapters on the Fixity of Species and on Rudimentary
Organs, certain difficulties which loom up when the question is raised,
How did varieties become distinct species? However, even if it were to
be assumed that some satisfying answer might be found to this question
so far as the stages of incomplete organs are concerned, there is