TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY THOMAS J. McCORMACK...

THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY. LONDON AGENTS: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd. 1902. Copyright by The Open Court Publishing Co. 1896...

The present paper was read in the first general meeting of the International Congress of Zoölogists at Leyden on September 16, 1895. Several points, which for reasons of brevity were omitted when the paper was read, have been re-embodied in the text, and an Appendix has been added where a number of topics receive fuller treatment than could well be accorded to them in a lecture. The address was first printed in The Monist for January, 1896, and afterwards in a German pamphlet. The basal idea of

Numerous and varied are the objections that have been advanced against the theory of selection since it was first enunciated by Darwin and Wallace—from the unreasoning strictures of Richard Owen and the acute and thoughtful criticisms of Albert Wigand and Nägeli to the opposition of our own day, which contends that selection cannot create but only reject, and which fails to see that precisely through this rejection its creative efficacy is asserted. The champions of this view are for discovering

[1] Neue Gedanken zur Vererbungsfrage, eine Antwort an Herbert Spencer. Jena. 1895. [2] See Boltzmann, Methoden der theor. Physik , Munich, 1892. (In the Catalogue of the Mathematical Exhibit.) [3] Of late this saying of Newton's is frequently quoted as if Newton were a downright contemner of scientific hypotheses. But if we read the passage in question in its original context, we shall discover that his renunciation of hypotheses referred solely to a definite case, viz., to that of universal gr