Note {198} — Chapter I · ON THE VARIATION OF ORGANIC BEINGS UNDER DOMESTICATION; AND ON THE PRINCIPLES OF SELECTION

Selection is here used in the sense of isolation, rather than as implying the summation of small differences. Professor Henslow in his Heredity of Acquired Characters in Plants, 1908, p. 2, quotes from Darwin’s Var. under Dom., Ed. i. II. p. 271, a passage in which the author, speaking of the direct action of conditions, says:—“A new sub-variety would thus be produced without the aid of selection.” Darwin certainly did not mean to imply that such varieties are freed from the action of natural selection, but merely that a new form may appear without summation of new characters. Professor Henslow is apparently unaware that the above passage is omitted in the second edition of Var. under Dom., II. p. 260.