ence of such remarkable powers in
pointers and setters may be accounted for; while it is otherwise
unaccountable. These instances, and many others such, I should have
gladly used in support of my argument, had they been available; but
unfortunately they are not.

On the next page of the Duke of Argyll's article (page 145), occurs a
passage which I must quote at length before I can deal effectually with
its various statements. It runs as follows:--

"But if natural selection is a mere phrase, vague enough and wide
enough to cover any number of the physical causes concerned in
ordinary generation, then the whole of Mr. Spencer's laborious
argument in favour of his 'other factor' becomes an argument worse
than superfluous. It is wholly fallacious in assuming that this
'factor' and 'natural selection' are at all exclusive of, or even
separate from, each other. The factor thus assumed to be new is
simply one of the subordinate cases of heredity. But heredity is
the central idea of natural selection. Therefore natural selection
includes and covers all the causes which can possibly operate
through inheritance. There is thus no difficulty whatever in
referring it to the same one factor whose solitary dominion Mr.
Spencer has plucked up courage to dispute. He will never succeed in
shaking its dictatorship by such a small rebellion. His little
contention is like some bit of Bumbledom setting up for Home
Rule--some parochial vestry claiming independence of a universal
empire. It pretends to set up for itself in some fragment of an
idea. But here is not even a fragment to boast of or to stand up
for. His new factor in organic evolution has neither independence
nor novelty. Mr. Spencer is able to quote himself as having
mentioned it in his _Principles of Biology_ published some twenty
years ago; and by a careful ransacking of Darwin he shows that the
idea was familiar to and admitted by him at least in his last
edition of the _Origin of Species_.... Darwin was a man so much
wiser than all his followers," &c.

Had there not been the Duke of Argyll's signature to the article, I
could scarcely have believed that this passage was written by him.
Remembering that on reading his article in the preceding number of this
Review, I was struck by the extent of knowledge, clearness of
discrimination, and power of expos