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54
The Romanes Lecture 1894
This case is of additional interest as it may serve to convince those Naturalists who are still inclined to maintain that acquired characters are inherited and to support the Lamarckian principle of development, that their view cannot be the right one. It has not proved tenable in a single instance—not even in the particular case on which so much stress has been laid by one of the recent advocates of this doctrine.
The facts here brought forward, as well as the interpretation of them at which I have arrived, confirm me more strongly than ever in the belief that selection is the all-sufficient principle on which the development of the organic world has been guided on its course.
