Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, June 1899: Volume LVVarious
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, June 1899: Volume LV
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
"Their wonderful and admirable fitness for their own most necessary
part in the economy of the hive must, therefore, be inherited from
parents who have never been exposed to those conditions to which the
workers are adapted; and this adaptation can not be due to the
inheritance of the effect of these conditions, nor can we believe that
they are inherited from some remote time, when the workers were
perfect females or when the queens were also workers; for the sterile
workers of allied species differ among themselves, thus proving that
they have undergone modification since they became sterile.
"Here we have a most complicated and perfect adjustment of marvelous
efficacy to external conditions which are of such a character as to
prove that the inheritance of the effect of these conditions has had
no part in the production of the adaptation."
His views of bird migration, based on the matter of ovulation and not
on food supply, are extremely interesting. He says: "As their eggs are
very large and heavy, a high birth rate is incompatible with flight,
and the preservation of each species imperatively demands that every
egg shall be cared for with increasing solicitude; for while in other
animals increased danger to eggs or young may be met and compensated
by an increase in the birth rate, the birth rate of birds can not be
much increased without a corresponding restriction of the power of
flight. Every one knows how quickly birds may be exterminated by the
destruction of their eggs or young, and the low birth rate of all
birds of powerful flight is a sufficient reason for migration, for at
the same time that their fitness for flight limits the birth rate, it
permits them to seek nesting places beyond the reach of their
enemies."
His critical estimate of Huxley is tersely presented. He says: "His
evolution is not a system of philosophy, but part of the system of
science. It deals with history--with the phenomenal world--and not
with the question what may or may not lie behind it.
"The cultivation of natural science in this historical field and the
discovery that the present order of living things, including
conscious, thinking, ethical man, has followed after an older and
simpler state of Nature, is not 'philosophy' but science. It involves
no more belief in the teachings of any system of philosophy than does
the knowledge that we are the children of our parents and the parents
of our children; but it is what Huxley means by 'evolution.'"
Dr. Brooks credits Galton with employing simple terms to express new
and abstruse truths, and we trust those who are continually wrestling
with the dead languages to pick out new and distracting words to
express their conceptions will profit by Galton's method.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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