Moreover, in this connexion we must take particular notice that the year after I had published these articles on the Cessation of Selection, and discussed with Mr. Darwin the bearing of this principle on the question of the transmission of acquired characters, Mr. Galton followed with his highly important essay on Heredity. For in this essay Mr. Galton fully adopted the principle of the Cessation of Selection, and was in consequence the first publicly to challenge the Lamarckian principles--pointing out that, if it were thus possible to deny the transmission of acquired characters _in toto_, "we should be relieved from all further trouble"; but that, if such characters are transmitted "in however faint a degree, a complete theory of heredity must account for them." Thus the question which, in its revived condition, is now attracting so much attention, was propounded in all its parts some fifteen or sixteen years ago; and no additional facts or new considerations of any great importance bearing upon the subject have been adduced since that time. In other words, about a year after my own conversations with Mr. Darwin, the whole matter was still more effectively brought before his notice by his own cousin. And the result was that he still retained his belief in the Lamarckian factors of organic evolution, even more strongly than it was retained either by Mr. Galton or myself[60]. [60] For a fuller statement of Mr. Galton's theory of Heredity, and its relation to Weismann's, see _An Examination of Weismannism_. We have now considered the line of evidence on which Darwin chiefly relied in proof of the transmissibility of acquired characters; and it must be allowed that this line of evidence is practically worthless. What he regarded as the inherited effects of use and of disuse may be entirely due to the cessation of selection in the case of our domesticated animals, combined with an active _reversal_ of selection in the case of natural species. And in accordance with this view is the fact that the degeneration of disused parts proceeds much further in the case of wild species than it does in that of domesticated varieties. For although it may be said that in the case of wild species more time has been allowed for a greater accumulation of the inherited effects of disuse than can have been the case with domesticated varieties, the alternative explanation is at least as probable--that in the case of wild species the merely negative, or passive, influence of the _cessation_ of selection has been continuously and powerfully assisted by the positive, or active, influence of the _reversal_ of selection, through economy of growth and the general advantage to be derived from the abolition of useless parts[61]. [61] For a fuller explanation of the important difference between the mere cessation and the actual reversal of selection, see Appendix I.