FREIBURG, Nov. 18, 1895. * * * * * {11} GERMINAL SELECTION. * * * * * Numerous and varied are the objections that have been advanced against the theory of selection since it was first enunciated by Darwin and Wallace--from the unreasoning strictures of Richard Owen and the acute and thoughtful criticisms of Albert Wigand and Naegeli to the opposition of our own day, which contends that selection cannot create but only reject, and which fails to see that precisely through this rejection its creative efficacy is asserted. The champions of this view are for discovering the motive forces of evolution in the _laws_ that govern organisms--as if the norm according to which an event happens were the event itself, as if the rails which determine the direction of a train could supplant the locomotive. Of course, from every form of life there proceeds only a definite, though extremely large, number of tracks, _the possible variations_, whilst between them lie stretches without tracks, _the impossible variations_, on which locomotion is impossible. But the actual travelling of a track is not performed by the track, but by the locomotive, and on the other hand, the choice of a track, the decision whether the destination of the train shall be Berlin or Paris, is not made by the locomotive, the cause of the variation, but by the driver of the locomotive, who directs the engine on the right track. In the theory of selection the engine-driver is represented by utility, for with utility rests the decision {12} as to what particular variational track shall be travelled. 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 that certainly is the great problem of life. Not the fact of change, but the _manner_ of the change, whereby all things are maintained capable of life and existence, is the pressing question.