Weismann states that those critics who maintain that selection cannot create, but only reject, “fail to see that precisely through this rejection its creative efficacy is asserted.” There is raised here, though not for the first time, a point that is of no small importance for both Darwinians and anti-Darwinians to consider; for, without further examination, it is by no means self-evident, as Weismann implies, that by exterminating all variations that are below the average the standard of successive generations could ever be raised beyond the most extreme fluctuating variation. At least this appears to be the case if individual, fluctuating variations be the sort selected, and it is to this kind of variation to which Weismann presumably refers. Without discussing this point here, let us examine further what Weismann has to say. He thinks that while in each form there may be a very large number of possible variations, yet there are also impossible variations as well, which do not appear. “The cogency, the irresistible cogency as I take it, of the principle of selection is precisely its capacity of explaining why fit structures always arise, and this certainly is the great problem of life.” Weismann points out that it is a remarkable fact that to-day, after science has been in possession of this principle for something over thirty years, “during which time she has busily occupied herself with its scope, the estimation in which the theory is held should be on the decline.” “It would be easy to enumerate a long list of living writers who assign to it a subordinate part only in evolution, or none at all.” “Even Huxley implicitly, yet distinctly, intimated a doubt regarding the principle of selection when he said: ‘Even if the Darwinian hypothesis were swept away, evolution would still stand where it is.’ Therefore he, too, regarded it as not impossible that this hypothesis should disappear from among the great explanatory principles by which we seek to approach nearer to the secrets of nature.”