Moreover, any such meaning is out of accordance with the context from which the passage is taken. For, after a long consideration of the question of utility, Darwin sums up,--"We thus see that with plants many morphological changes may be attributed to the laws of growth and the interaction of parts, _independently of natural selection_." And then he adds,--"From the fact of the above characters being _unimportant for the welfare of the species_, any slight variations which occurred in them _would not have been augmented through natural selection_." Again, still within the same passage, he says, while alluding to the causes other than natural selection which lead to changes of specific characters,--"If the _unknown cause_ were to act almost uniformly for a length of time, we may infer that the result would be almost uniform; and in this case _all_ the individuals of the _species_ would be modified in the same manner." For my own part I do not understand how Mr. Wallace can have overlooked these various references to _species_, all of which occur on the very page from which he is quoting. The whole argument is to show that "many morphological changes may be attributed to the laws of growth and the inter-action of parts [_plus_ external conditions of life], independently of natural selection"; that such non-adaptive changes, when they occur as "specific characters," may, if the species should afterwards give rise to genera, families, &c., become distinctive of these higher divisions. But there is nothing here, or in any other part of Darwin's writings, to countenance the inconsistent notion which Mr. Wallace appears to entertain,--viz. that species which present useless characters are more apt to give rise to genera, families, &c., than are species which do not present such characters. The next passage which Mr. Wallace quotes, with his comments thereon, is as follows. The italics are his.