The Passing of Evolution 77 God to make it work.” By no stretch of legitimate reasoning can Darwinism be made to exclude design. Indeed, if it should be proved that species have developed from others of a lower order, as varieties are supposed to have done, it would strengthen rather than weaken the standard argument from design. But the proof of Darwinism even is by no means alto gether convincing, and its votaries are split up into as many warring sects as are the theologians. New schools of evolu tionists arise as rapidly as do new schools of Biblical critics. Strangely enough the “Neo Darwinians” go back to the theory of Lamarck that variations are the result of effort and use on the part of the animal; whereas Darwin denied the inheritance of acquired characteristics; while Weissmann goes to the extreme of holding that natural selection must be carried back to the ultimate atoms of primordial matter, where he would set up his competitive struggle for existence. Romanes and Gulick, however, insist that specific variations often occur from “segregation,” entirely independent of natural Selection. Nor do the champions of evolution have a very exalted estimate of each other’s opinions. In a letter to Sir Joseph Hooker in 1866, referring to Spencer, Darwin wrote: “I feel rather mean when I read him: I could bear and rather enjoy feeling that he was twice as ingenious and clever as myself, but when I feel that he is about a dozen times my superior, even in the master art of wriggling, I feel aggrieved. If he had trained himself to observe more, even at the expense, by a law of balancement, of some loss of thinking power, he would have been a wonderful man.” ( “Life and Letters,” Vol. ii., p. 239.) To account for heredity, Darwin, in his theory of “pan genesis,” suggested that infinitesimal “gemmules” were thrown off from every part of the body or plant, and that they had “a mutual affinity for each other leading to their aggregation either into buds or into the sexual elements.” But when he
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