"usefulness." An organ must be already useful before
natural selection can take hold of it to improve it. Selection cannot
make a thing useful to start with, but only (possibly) make more useful
what already exists. Until the newly formed buds of developing limbs or
organs became decidedly "useful" to the individual or the species, would
they not be in the way, merely so many hindrances, to be removed by
natural selection instead of being preserved and improved? But, in this
view of the matter, they argued, what single organ of any species would
there be that must not thus have appeared long before it was wanted?

Or to use the pungent words quoted with approval by Hugo de Vries at the
end of his "Species and Varieties" (pp. 825, 826), "Natural selection
may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the
arrival of the fittest."

This side of the argument is dwelt upon at some length by Alex. Graham
Bell, as reported in a recent interview. He says:

"Natural selection does not and cannot produce new species or varieties
or cause modifications of living organisms to come into existence. On
the contrary, its sole function is to prevent evolution. In its action
it is destructive merely,--not constructive,--causing death and
extinction, not life and progression. Death cannot produce life; and
though natural selection may produce the death of the unfit, it cannot
produce the fit, far less evolve the fittest. It may permit the fit to
survive by not killing them off, if they are already in existence; but
it does not bring them into being, or produce improvement in them after
they have once appeared."[24]

[Footnote 24: _World's Work_, December, 1913, p. 177.]

Opposing these Neo-Lamarckians were such prominent scientists as August
Weismann, A.R. Wallace, E. Ray Lankester, who strenuously opposed the
idea that "acquired characters," or more precisely _parental
experience_, are ever transmissible. In the subsequent years the
greatest variety of experimental tests have been applied to secure the
hereditary transmission of any sort of such acquired characters, with
uniformly negative results. One of the most elaborate of these
experiments was conducted by a German botanist, who transplanted 2,500
different kinds of mountain plants to the lowlands, where he studied
them for several years alongside their relatives, natives of these
lowlands. He found that their mountain environment had made absolutely
no permane