That I do not deny the existence of true climatic forms in admitting
this principle of ‘amixia,’ as has been frequently imagined, appears
sufficiently from the treatise in question. The question arises,
however, whether climatic influences may not also originate forms
by ‘amixia’ by making a species variable. It would be difficult at
present to decide finally upon this subject. If, however, in all cases
a variation in a certain fixed direction occurred through climatic
influences, a form could not arise by ‘amixia’ from such a variability,
since the components could then produce resultants different only
in degree and not in kind. But we are not yet able to extend our
researches to such fine distinctions.
As a final, and not unimportant result of these investigations, I may
once more insist that dissimilar influences, when they alternatingly
affect a long series of originally similar generations in regularly
recurring change, only modify the generations concerned, and not
intermediate ones. Or, more briefly, cyclically acting causes of
change produce cyclically recurring changes: under their influence
series of monomorphic generations become formed into a cycle of di- or
polymorphic generations.
There is no occasion to return here to the immediate evidence and
proof of the foregoing law. In the latter, however, is comprised the
question--is not the cycle of generations produced by cyclical heredity
ultimately equivalent to Darwin and Haeckel’s homochronic heredity
which forms the ontogenetic stages into a cycle? It is possible
that from this point, in the future, the nature of the processes of
heredity, which are still so obscure, may be penetrated into, and both
phenomena traced to the same cause, as can now be only surmised but not
clearly perceived.
Finally, the most general, and in so far chief result of these
investigations, appears to me to lie in the conclusion, which may
be thus formulated:--A species is only caused to change through the
influence of changing external conditions of life, this change being
in a fixed direction which entirely depends on the physical nature of
the varying organism, and is different in different species, or even in
the two sexes of the same species.
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