Heredity, health and personal beauty.

  • Shoemaker, John V. (John Veitch), 1852-1910.
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Heredity, health and personal beauty. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    of organic development it is subject to no law but that which makes it the false seeming of a reality. Therefore, as law is apparently omnipresent we can afford to say that, unless it be a real law that we seem to see, there is no organic evolution; but, on the contrary, if that seeming be real, that the law involves the transmission of all characters, those arising from the inter- vention of man, those termed fortuitous, as well as those arising in the stress of the most implacable struggle for existence, and consequently in all these blended. The reader is now better prepared to consider understand- ingly the statements which, we said at the beginning, had awakened our surprise. We will treat of them seriatim, with somewhat more amplification than as there recorded. The first learned gentleman attempted to show that, the vital principle apart, all organic changes are, within the environment, chiefly consequent upon the use and disuse of vital parts. This is not, as we have intimated, a correct view. The use and disuse of vital parts is a vera causa, but not the primary one. The primary one, in order of importance and time, is the action of nature, exclusive or inclusive of man, in producing the variation which other agencies, even artificial and sexual selection in the higher organisms, subsequently contribute to mold. If, in the stress which nature puts upon organic life, disuse did not follow diminished usefulness, and increased usefulness greater use, and structure in conformity to both, change could not be permanent, for variation in any part necessitates functional and structural change in all, especially in co-ordinate parts. What- ever Darwin might have said, the effect of use and disuse of parts must lie back of his theory of organic evolution as the indispensable cause of permanent change; not of mere change, let the reader mark, but of permanent change in determinate directions. Darwin, however, affirms the fact in some places in his works and implies it in others. In the following passage he