A large body of facts and an adequate proportion of reasoning have been brought together in the preceding chapters. As far as I understand the proceedings in a court of law, the business of arriving at results or, as they are there called, verdicts, consists in collecting as many as possible of the facts which bear on the case, these are sifted and verified, or the reverse, a certain reasoning on them is carried on; on this the verdict rests. This case before the court is of a civil, not a criminal nature, and it is a claim made to a certain _derelict property_, that is to say, the honour of forming patterns on the hair of animals, claimed by Use and Habit. The facts concerned have never been disputed, possibly because they were not thought worth the trouble, but they have the singular merit of being open to almost any educated person for confirmation or correction, and the reasoning is certainly not profound, though I think it is cogent. In seeking a result in such a cause, or verdict, one claimant might content himself with an arrest of judgment, another that judgment should go by default, and a third would claim proof. It is with the last I desire to stand. _In one word the claim is that of causation._ Now no one can deny that between the groups of phenomena, habits and hair-patterns there is an evident relation; but the question may still arise, “What is the link between them?” I have just said that the facts are unquestioned; substantially they are unquestionable, and they are open to the charge that they belong to the dust-heaps of science, that they are, biologically speaking, such as used to engage the attention of Nicodemus Boffin. Perhaps they are. Of course if they were just collected haphazard and treated like a big collection of little shells in a cabinet, without reference to their natural order, they would possess no evidential value even if they were pretty, for so long as a natural fact remains without its suited interpretation, so long it belongs not to science. Hear Jevons: “Whatever is, is, and no natural fact is unworthy of study for the purpose of its interpretation.”[60] Hear also Sir E. Ray Lankester: “That only is entitled to the name of science which can be described as knowledge of causes or knowledge of the order of Nature.”[61] Fortified by the authority of a great logician and a great biologist I proceed to claim proof of causation. The stages of the case may be summed up as follows: 1. It has been shown that during the lifetime of an individual, muscular action can change the direction of the hair. Chapter VIII. 2. Undesigned experiment has shown that changes in the direction of the hair, mechanically produced in the individual, are sometimes transmitted to the descendants. Chapter XV. 3. In all the selected examples adequate and ascertainable causes have been demonstrated.