er, "Studies, etc.," p. 294 ff.

[7] Darwin says, on page 146, Eng. Ed., of his "Descent of Man": "In the
earlier editions of my 'Origin of Species', I perhaps attributed too much
to the action of natural selection or the survival of the fittest.... I did
not formerly sufficiently consider the existence of structures which, as
far as we can at present judge, are neither beneficial nor injurious; and
this I believe to be one of the greatest oversights as yet detected in my
work.... An unexplained residuum of change, perhaps a large one, must be
left to the assumed uniform action of those unknown agencies, which
occasionally induce strongly-marked and abrupt deviations of structure in
our domestic productions."

[8] This word, which is of recent coinage in Germany, has been found so
incapable of being rendered by an exact English equivalent, that it has
been thought best to retain it and to give the author's own explanation of
the meaning which he desired it to express. He says, in a note to the
translator: "I was led to this idea [of _Auslosung_] in a small essay of
Robert von Mayer ("Ueber Ausloesung," 1876). Afterwards Mayer personally
stated to me that he heartily approved the emphasis I had given to this
idea, and said that he had only thought of the fact that psychical
processes, like the action of the will, _losen aus_ (release) physiological
processes, like the action of the muscles, and that I had carried the idea
farther, in saying that psychical processes are _ausgelost_ (released) by
physiological processes, and that this is a very important step farther on
the way of investigation. Mayer himself thought it would be necessary to
call the attention to this, when he further developed the ideas he had
given in the before-mentioned essay; his intention to do so was prevented
by his death.

"_Auslosung_ is a word originated by modern mechanical science, and means:
(1.) Slight mechanical operations of detaching and the like, by which
another and more important action, whose forces were heretofore restrained,
can be set into activity: _e.g._, the pressure which sets in motion a
machine, previously at rest, is _Auslosung_; the pressure on the trigger of
a gun is _Auslosung_; the friction of a match which is the beginning of a
great fire is _Auslosung_. (2.) This idea may now be applied to chemical
processes: _e.g._, a glass of sugar-water will remain sweet unless some
foreign element is introduced into it, but the mo