Decadence of Darwinism 47 marvelously unscientific. Louis Agassiz, Lord Kelvin, and Dr. Virchow having passed on, the outlook for experimental science has been looking dark; but suddenly the light is breaking. Professor Gaston Bonnier, of the Sorbonne, M. de Cyon, and others, have just struck a thrilling chord and scientific Europe is awakening. Criticising Mr. Darwin in Pour et Contre le Darwinisme, M. Bonnier says: “The illustrious naturalist had no idea of the experi- mental method,” and he adds that he was imaginative and careless in his observations. In corroboration of this—pas sing by the spike-horn deer, the aquatic bear and the worn-off human tail, which all who are familiar with “The Descent of Man” will recall—take, for instance, the following: “Some naturalists have maintained that all variations are connected with the act of sexual reproduction; but this is certainly an error; for I have given, in another work, a long list of sporting plants, as they are called by gardeners; that is, of plants which have suddenly produced a single bud with a new and sometimes widely different character from that of the other buds on the same plant. These bud varia- tions, as they may be called, can be propagated by grafts, offsets, etc., and sometimes, by seed.” ( “Origin of Species,” Vol. I, p. 35.) How could M r . ,Darwin know that the seed from which the tree of the strange bud had grown had not been pollenized, any number of generations previously, by the strange strain? What would happen if vegetable and animal atavism—n ot a reversion to ancestral type, but latent generation, the waking and appearing of a strain as old, it may be, as the race, improved or damaged, even to the extent of freaks or monstrosities—should be found to accord with all known facts of the case, and to answer the hard questions for which Darwinism was devised? Surely the progression of a char- acter beneath the surface, whether for one year or a million —as the temper of a father not discernible in a son, but emerg-
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