Weismann[N] more recently accepts the view of Romanes, Morgan and Lankester on the inadequacy of panmixia to explain the whole phenomena of degeneration, and in his ‘Germinal Selection’ rejects the idea of reversed selection, and suggests a new explanation for what Romanes attributed to the failure of heredity and the Lamarckians to transmission of the effects of disuse. The struggle of the parts of Roux has been crowded by him back to the representatives of these parts in the germ. [N] The Monist, 1896, pp. 250-274. “The phenomena observed in the stunting, or degeneration, of parts rendered useless ... show distinctly that ordinary selection, which operates by the removal of entire persons--personal selection, as I prefer to call it--can not be the only cause of degeneration, for in most cases of degeneration it can not be assumed that slight individual vacillations in the size of the organ in question have possessed selective value. On the contrary, we see such retrogressions effected apparently in the shape of a continuous evolutionary process determined by internal causes, in the case of which there can be no question whatever of selection of persons or of a survival of the fittest--that is, of individuals with the smallest rudiments. The gradual diminution continuing for thousands and thousands of years and culminating in its final and absolute effacement” can only be accomplished by germinal selection. Germinal selection as applied to degeneration is the formal explanation of Romanes’ failure of heredity through the struggle of parts for food. “Powerful determinants will absorb nutriment more rapidly than weaker determinants. The latter, accordingly, will grow more slowly and will produce weaker determinants than the former.” If an organ is rendered useless, the size of this organ is no longer an element in personal selection. This alone would result in a slight degeneration. Minus variations are, however, supposed to rest “on the weaker determinants of the germ, such as absorb nutriment less powerfully than the rest. This will enable the stronger determinants to deprive them even of the full quantum of food corresponding to their weakened capacity of assimilation, and their descendants will be weakened still more. Inasmuch, now, as no weeding out of the weaker determinants of the hind leg [or eye] by personal selection takes place on our hypothesis, inevitably the average strength of this determinant must slowly but constantly diminish--that is, the hind leg [or eye] must grow smaller and smaller until it finally disappears altogether.... Panmixia is the indispensable precondition of the whole process; for, owing to the fact that persons with weak determinants are just as capable of life as those with strong, ... solely by this means is a further weakening effected in the following generations.”