My life : a record of events and opinions - Wallace-online.org

302 MY LIFEfair numbers and in full flower. We then went onto Lauterbrunnen and the Wengern Alp, where westayed two days, botanizing chiefly among the woodsand slopes near the Trummelthel. We were, however,so dreadfully persecuted by swarms of blood-suckingflies,which filled the air and covered us in thousands,piercing through our thin clothing, that we returnedhome some days earlier than we had intended.In 1896 I wrote an article on " The Gorge of theAar and its Teachings," as serving to enforce mypapers on the " Ice Age and its Work" three yearsbefore. But my most important scientific essay thisyear was a paper I read to the Linnaean Society on"The Problem of Utility." My purpose was to enforcethe view that all specific and generic charactersmust be (or once have been) useful to their possessor,or, owing to the complex laws of growth, be correlatedwith useful characters. It was necessary to discussthis point, because Mr. Romanes had unreservedlydenied it, and Professor Mivart, the Rev. Mr. Henslow,Mr. Bateson, and others, had taken the same view. Iendeavoured to show that the problem is a fundamentalone, that utility is the basic principle ofnatural selection, and that without natural selectionit has not been shown how specific characters canarise. By specific is, of course, meant characterswhich, either separately or in combination, distinguisheach species from all others, and which are found inall, or in the great bulk, of the individuals composingthe species ; and I have shown that it is for want ofclear thinking and accurate reasoning on the entireprocess of species formation thatthe idea of uselessspecific characters has arisen (see " Studies," vol. i.).During this summer I was invited by Dr. H. S.Lunn to go with him and his party to Davos for a