I still regard this idea as correct, but I attribute less importance to "organic selection" than I did at that time, in so far that I do not believe that it _alone_ could effect complex harmonious adaptations. Germinal selection now seems to me to play the chief part in bringing about such adaptations. Something the same is true of the principle I have called _Panmixia_. As I became more and more convinced, in the course of years, that the _Lamarckian principle_ ought not to be called in to explain the dwindling of disused parts, I believed that this process might be simply explained as due to the cessation of the conservative effect of natural selection. I said to myself that, from the moment in which a part ceases to be of use, natural selection withdraws its hand from it, and then it must inevitably fall from the height of its adaptiveness, because inferior variants would have as good a chance of persisting as better ones, since all grades of fitness of the part in question would be mingled with one another indiscriminately. This is undoubtedly true, as Romanes pointed out ten years before I did, and this mingling of the bad with the good probably does bring about a deterioration of the part concerned. But it cannot account for the steady diminution, which always occurs when a part is in process of becoming rudimentary, and which goes on until it ultimately disappears altogether. The process of dwindling cannot therefore be explained as due to panmixia alone: we can only find a sufficient explanation in germinal selection. IV. DERIVATIVES OF THE THEORY OF SELECTION The impetus in all directions given by Darwin through his theory of selection has been an immeasurable one, and its influence is still felt. It falls within the province of the historian of science to enumerate all the ideas which, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, grew out of Darwin's theories, in the endeavour to penetrate more deeply into the problem of the evolution of the organic world. Within the narrow limits to which this paper is restricted, I cannot attempt to discuss any of these. V. ARGUMENTS FOR THE REALITY OF THE PROCESSES OF SELECTION (_a_) _Sexual Selection_