Abstract
IN his letter on “Mr. Romanes's Paradox” (NATURE, November 1, p. 7), Mr. Thiselton Dyer questions the existence of indifferent or slightly disadvantageous specific characters. That letter referred, in a highly laudatory yet somewhat deprecating manner, to a lately published (Proc. Roy. Soc., No. 269) obituary notice of Mr. Darwin; and it implied that Mr. G. J. Romanes, from his unfamiliarity with the study of species, did not quite know what he was talking about when he asserted that such indifferent characters do in fact exist. I, who claim to have had some slight experience in the practical discrimination of species, ask permission to make a few observations in your columns on the subject.
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MIVART, S. Natural Selection and Useless Structures. Nature 39, 127 (1888). https://doi.org/10.1038/039127a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/039127a0
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