In conclusion it may be remarked that biologists do not claim to have solved all the problems connected with heredity and variation. But the general results taught us by Mendelism are now established beyond controversy. Led by the German biologists, the leading scientists of the world had already acknowledged that "pure" Darwinism or natural selection cannot explain the origin of new organs or new forms. And now Mendelism destroys the other supposed foundation for biological evolution, by showing that small variations cannot be accumulated into large differences equal in value to a unit character or a new species. Thus the whole foundation of biological evolution has been completely undermined by these new discoveries; and were it not for the wide-spread credence the evolutionary theory has already received, and the intellectual momentum it has acquired tending to carry it on by its inertia into the future, it could be only a very short time now before the elaborate treatises attempting to orientate with it all the facts of religion and history would have to be consigned to the shelves labeled, "Of Historic Interest." For as Bateson remarked in his recent address as President before the British Association at Melbourne, Australia, the new knowledge of heredity shows that whatever evolution there is occurs by loss of factors and not by gain, and that in this way the progress of science is "destroying much that till lately passed for gospel."[32] [Footnote 32: In commenting on these views of Bateson, Prof. S.C. Holmes, of the University of California, well speaks of them as "an illustration of _the bankruptcy of present evolutionary theory."--Science_, September 3, 1915.] V Let us sum up the situation. We began this chapter with the question, Have new kinds of plants and animals originated in modern times comparable in all essential respects with the idea of true species? The answer of modern science is reluctantly obtained, but it is a negative. De Vries and others have indeed originated new kinds that were loudly hailed as new species, and are doubtless as deserving of specific rank as many already listed for years in the treatises of specialists. Indeed there is every reason to believe that almost countless numbers of our taxonomic species have originated from common ancestral originals. But as these so-called species are now known to be freely or moderately cross fertile with other related species, their hybrids following the ordinary laws of Mendelian inheritance, we see that they are not true species but mere analytic varieties.