Surely if disuse can be credited with the vast powers involved in
Mr. Darwin's statement that it has probably "been the main agent in
rendering organs rudimentary," no limits are assignable to the
accumulated effects of habit, provided the effects of habit, or use
and disuse, are supposed, as Mr. Darwin supposed them, to be
inheritable at all. Darwinians have at length woke up to the
dilemma in which they are placed by the manner in which Mr. Darwin
tried to sit on the two stools of use and disuse, and natural
selection of accidental variations, at the same time. The knell of
Charles-Darwinism is rung in Mr. Wallace's present book, and in the
general perception on the part of biologists that we must either
assign to use and disuse such a predominant share in modification as
to make it the feature most proper to be insisted on, or deny that
the modifications, whether of mind or body, acquired during a single
lifetime, are ever transmitted at all. If they can be inherited at
all, they can be accumulated.
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