II.

To my mind there is a genuine pleasure in giving expression to admiration of any great intellectual achievement; and it is much rather for that reason than on account of any value which I imagine my opinion on such a subject can possess, that, having had occasion to name the illustrious author of the 'Origin of Species,' I desire to preface my criticism on what appears to me to be a grave defect in his theory, by intimating my hearty concurrence in its leading principles. That inasmuch as, owing to the exceeding fecundity of the generality of organic beings, more individuals of almost every species are born than can possibly survive, and that consequently a desperate struggle for existence must take place amongst them; that in such a struggle the smallest grain may turn the scale, the minutest advantage possessed by some individuals over others determine which shall live and which shall die; that, as the circumstances in which life is to be maintained change, the character and structure of organisms must change also in order to be accommodated thereto, but that the changes which consequently take place in some individuals are better suited to the altered circumstances than those which take place in other individuals; that individual offspring, moreover, although always strongly resembling their parents in the majority of particulars, always exhibit some slight differences from them; that of these differences such as do not render the offspring less fit will almost of necessity render them more fit for coping with their rivals; and that superior fitness, however acquired, is as likely as any other quality to be transmitted to succeeding generations--all these are indisputable facts, and from these, as premisses, it seems to me not so much to be legitimately deducible that most existing species may have been produced 'by descent, with modification, through natural selection,' or 'survival of the fittest,' as necessarily to follow that they cannot have originated in any other way. For _all_ species to have been created such as they now are, is simply inconsistent with the premisses. Whatever beings may at any remote epoch have been created, there must, according to the conditions involved, have been amongst their descendants some better fitted, by reason of divergence from the parent type, for engaging in internecine strife than those, if any such there were, which adhered closely to that type. Whether, then, among the survivors from the first engagement in that never-ending struggle for life which must have commenced soon after the creation, there were or were not any exact representatives of the parent type, there must have been some exhibiting more or less of divergence from that type. Among the descendants of these, again, there must have been some who, together with the structural or other advantages inherited from their immediate ancestors, possessed, moreover, some advantages first nascent in themselves, and who were similarly enabled thereby to prevail over their less gifted competitors, and similarly to transmit all their advantages to a posterity, some members of which would similarly be born with certain new advantages in addition. By continual repetition of these processes, and the consequent accumulation of divergencies from the original pattern, however slight those divergencies might separately be, there could not but eventually become formed breeds so distinct from each other as to be to all intents and purposes distinct species, in whichsoever of its many vague senses the term 'species' be understood. Now these species, instead of having been created, would be the result of divergence from their created progenitor. Whether, therefore, any created species do or do not still exist, it is certain that among existing species there are some that were not created, but which have been gradually evolved, and evolved, too, through survival of the fittest. Mr. Darwin, then, is fairly entitled to the praise of having placed beyond dispute that a process called by himself 'Natural Selection,' and by Mr. Herbert Spencer 'Survival of the Fittest,' has almost from the commencement of organic life been, and still is, in

## active operation; that it is a cause which must needs have originated

some species, and is quite competent to have originated all that still exist; whereas creation, the only other suggested cause, cannot be conceived to have done this latter unless every minutest shade of difference between offspring and parent be regarded as the effect of a separate creative act. Unless creation have originated every one of those divergencies the accumulation of which constitutes a species, clearly it cannot have originated that species. With some of the phenomena connected with species the theory of creation cannot be reconciled unless this novel interpretation be placed upon the word creation, whereas there are none of the phenomena with which the evolutionary hypothesis conflicts, and few, if any, which, when restricted to its proper office of auxiliary, it will not help to explain.

To what we might thus be assured of, even if we had only general principles to guide us, all obtainable evidence unanimously testifies. Geology distinctly proclaims that every portion of our globe's surface has undergone vast changes, and that its organic inhabitants have changed simultaneously and proportionately. The proof absolute, which it furnishes, that at a period when few, if any, existing species had made their appearance, many species now extinct already existed, is proof equally absolute that if all species extinct and extant were created, they cannot, at any rate, have been created at the same time. Of so much at least we must be satisfied, unless we are prepared to accept the ingenious conjecture of an orthodox divine, that, while our earth was being formed out of chaos, Satan, to confound the faith of remote generations, brought over bones of monsters from other worlds and embedded them in the soil of ours, or that, as the same idea has been otherwise expressed, while the earth's crust was a baking the devil had a finger in the pie. Moreover, on the supposition that there was a break of ages between the creations of extinct and of extant species, as geology positively declares there must have been if both were separately created, how passing strange is the 'grand fact that all extinct beings can be classed with all recent beings'! The strangeness disappears, however, when both are regarded as descendants of common progenitors. The wonder would then be if they could not be so classed. Again, how astonishing on the creative, how natural on the evolutionary hypothesis, that the arrangement of bones in the hand of a man, the wing of a bat, the fin of a porpoise, the leg of a horse, should be precisely the same; the number of vertebræ in the neck of a giraffe, and in that of an elephant the same; the primitive germs from which a man, a dog, a frog, and a lobster are gradually evolved, to all appearance the same--the same microscopic atom of homogeneous matter, undistinguishable by any known test from an animalcule almost at the bottom of the organic scale! Above all, that the courses by which animals of all degrees of complexity are gradually developed from apparently equally simple germs should, whenever traceable, be found to consist of progressive ramifications, so that every higher animal, before arriving at maturity, passes through several stages at the end of each of which lower animals have stopped! How impossible, or how easy, to understand, according as the one or the other hypothesis is adopted, is the phenomenon of what in the one case will be treated as rudimentary, in the other as obsolete, organs! No one need scruple to regard these as apparatus which the creature has outgrown and allowed to fall into decay through neglect; but whatever there is in us of real nobleness of feeling revolts against the notion of their being apparatus which a divine Creator began to build but was not able to finish. And yet again, how insultingly irreconcilable with any rational estimate of Divine nature is the possibility of any existing type of mammals having been created, seeing that if so, it must have been created with _false_ marks of nourishment from the womb of a mother that never existed!

These are some of the main grounds on which the Darwinian theory rests. Of the abundance of detailed illustrations from which it may derive additional support no adequate idea can be formed, except by careful perusal of its author's own writings, and these fortunately may without much exaggeration be said to be in everybody's hands. Of the arguments that have been brought forward in opposition to it, all seem to me to be susceptible of very complete answers, and one or two of the strongest, of answers more complete than they have yet received. True, there is no disputing the testimony borne by the paintings and sculptures of Egyptian tombs, and of Ninevite palaces, that the basement floors in Thebes and Memphis were infested by much the same sort of beetles as those which are such nuisances in London kitchens; that Sardanapalus, if ever he exchanged indoor for outdoor sports, may have hunted with dogs and horses that might pass muster at an English meet, and that the Pharaohs were served by negro slaves as like as two peas in all externals to those who in the United States have recently and prematurely been metamorphosed into free and independent electors. But all this only proves that certain species which existed 4,000 years ago are still represented by unchanged descendants. It does not prove that other descendants and groups of descendants from the same species have not within the same period undergone changes sufficiently great to convert them into distinct races; neither, if it did prove thus much, would it do more than afford a presumption, and a very deceptive one, that 4,000 years are too short a time for the formation of a new race, affording besides, at the same time, much stronger presumption that, within the remotest limits to which Mosaic chronology can be pushed back, the various races of mankind, white, black, and intermediately tinted, can not possibly have descended from one pair of ancestors.

That domesticated animals, when suffered to run wild, always return to the primitive wild type--this, instead of an argument against, is one of the strongest arguments for the evolution theory, from which it is indeed, as Mr. G. H. Lewes says, a necessary deduction. It is simply because, as the conditions of life change, structure must, for adaptation's sake, change likewise, that wild animals are capable of being domesticated, of being, that is, made to undergo modifications by being brought from the conditions of wildness to those of domesticity. How, then, should they possibly retain those modifications, how escape return to their previous shape and habits, when retransferred from domesticity to wildness?

The question, Why are not new species continually produced? may be aptly met by another. How, consistently with the theory, is it possible they should? Natural Selection is represented as acting 'solely by accumulating slight successive favourable variations,' as taking only short and slow steps. By what possibility, then, can it suddenly produce modifications sufficiently conspicuous to mark off a new species? New species may be, and indeed are, constantly in process of formation on all sides, under our very eyes, without our being aware; for since the process requires ages for its accomplishment, it must needs be imperceptible by the keenest observation. So that even when a new species is completed, it is not recognised as new, so minute is the difference between the perfection to which it has attained, and the imperfect state in which we and our fathers before us had long known it.

'Why, however, since, according to the theory of Natural Selection, an interminable number of intermediate forms must have existed, linking together all the species in each group by gradations as fine as are our present varieties--why do we not see these linking forms all around us?' To this objection the very theory against which it is urged affords a

## partial and almost adequate reply, the deficiencies of which are

besides to some extent supplied by embryology and geology, and to a farther extent accounted for by the meagreness of the geological record. Natural selection for survival necessarily implies extinction of all that are not selected to survive, so that fossil remains are now the only procurable evidence that any of these latter that have long been extinct ever existed. But very many organic beings are incapable of being preserved in a fossil condition, while of those which can be so preserved 'the number of specimens in all our museums is absolutely as nothing compared with the countless generations of countless species that must have existed.' It should be recollected, too, that among still existing forms are to be included several which result from uterine transformation, and are never found alive except _in utero_.

Another objection, notwithstanding the great stress often laid on it, seems to me to be altogether beside the real issue. It is the one derived from the invariable sterility, real or supposed, of hybrids. A fact cited by Mr. Lewes,[37] that of the fecundity of a cross called _Leporides_, bred by M. Rouy of Angoulême, between the hare and rabbit, of which a thousand on an average were for many years, and probably are still, sent annually to market, would seem to be decisive against the assumed sterility; but, however this be, matters not the least in regard to the efficacy of Natural Selection, which, be it once again observed, is represented as producing new species, not suddenly by the copulation of two old and utterly distinct ones, but very gradually and slowly, by the accumulation of minute differences occurring in successive individuals of the same species.

The chief if not the only serious obstacles to acceptance of Darwinism seem to me to be of the author's own creation. Now and then he appears somewhat needlessly to overstrain his principles, as for instance when he intimates his conviction that 'all individuals of the same species, and all the closely allied species of most genera,' will hereafter be discovered to 'have descended from one parent and to have migrated from some one birthplace.' This, to my mind, is much more unlikely than his further suggestion that 'all animals and plants are descended from some one prototype.' Startling as this second proposition may be on first hearing, it may not very improbably express the real fact, provided by 'some one prototype' be signified, not a single individual, but several individuals of one and the same type. Beyond all doubt there was a time when on and about our earth all matter was as yet inorganic, and when whatever spirit,[38] of the sort so termed in contradistinction to matter, either permeated the earth's substance or moved about its surface, must have been as yet unembodied. Mr. Darwin demands whether any one can 'really believe that at innumerable periods in the earth's history, elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues.' I for one certainly am far from believing this. I see no reason for believing that, whatever other phenomenon, at all similar, may at any stage of the world's progress have occurred, it has at innumerable subsequent stages been repeated; neither do I consider that the phenomenon is likely to have worn the guise of a sudden flash. But I do firmly believe, and am quite unable to substitute any equally plausible substitute for the belief, that when the crust of the earth had sufficiently cooled, and when other physical conditions had become such as to admit of the manifestation of that life which we are accustomed to distinguish by attaching to it the epithet 'organic,' certain of those forces[39] which, in my opinion, constitute matter, did, either of their own accord or under superior direction--not suddenly flash, but--slowly elaborate themselves into organic structures of some exceedingly simple type; that in the course of ages these simple structures either developed themselves or were developed into structures rendered by slow degrees more and more complex, until the degree of complexity attained, being such as to fit them for being inhabited by spirit previously unembodied, they were, by individualised portions of such spirit, appropriated and inhabited accordingly. Beyond all doubt, at some period or other, what had always previously been unorganised matter must have become organised. Of two things one, then. Either this matter must, whether under superior direction or not, have organised itself, or it must have been organised by some other agency. Mr. Darwin, together with all thorough-going Darwinians, inclines, I suspect, to the opinion that matter organised itself; but if so, it cannot possibly have been inert or lifeless, but must have been active and animate, and capable of volition; and on that condition, there is no great stretch of fancy in imagining it to have spontaneously adopted the series of arrangements indicated. If, on the other hand, we are content to admit that some external superior intelligence may have performed, or conducted, or presided over operations, all room for wonder vanishes.

In regard to the character of the structural prototype, that, of course, would depend in part on surrounding physical conditions, and if these have ever been the same in all parts of the globe, there is no apparent reason why any number of specimens of the prototype may not anywhere have been independently elaborated. It is not possible, however, that, since the earth began to revolve round the sun, physical conditions can have been _simultaneously_ the same in all latitudes; while, on the other hand, it seems probable that, although the same set of conditions might perhaps admit of the production of only one organic type, there might be other sets of conditions favourable to the production of other types. On the whole, then, it seems more probable that inorganic matter combined (or _was_ combined) in the first instance in several modes, than in one single mode, in order to become organic. But whatever may have been the organic form or forms it first took, to assume that only a single individual of each form was independently elaborated, and that all other individuals, both of the same form and of all the more complex forms, gradually evolved from that one--are descendants from the same first individual, the same first parent--surely very gratuitously increases the difficulties of the subject. Especially it complicates the problem of the distribution of the same plants and animals over countries immemorially separated by gulfs apparently impassable by natural means.

The obstruction which Mr. Darwin has created to the progress of his opinions by the exaggerated shape in which some of them have been presented is, however, as nothing in comparison with the injury he does to his theory by obstinately rejecting certain materials indispensable for its satisfactory completion. What an admirable theory it is so far as it goes! How nicely it fits into all the facts it comes in contact with, even into those which it is, of itself and unassisted, incompetent to explain! How elevating too and ennobling, when rightly conceived! for who can fail to rejoice in the view it presents of 'Natural selection working solely by and for the good of each being' that it spares, and causing 'all corporal and mental endowments to tend towards perfection'? or who need mind suspecting himself to be descended, through an ape, from a triton or a hydra, if he may compensate himself by hoping to have a distant posterity of angels? How well, moreover, would it, if permitted, chime in with any rational religion, besides being, as already hinted, absolutely essential to that part of the Mosaic creed which represents all the variously coloured and variously featured races of men as springing from one single couple. By what perversity then is it that Mr. Darwin takes such pains, if not to render his theory irreligious, at least to exclude from it the assistance which religion alone can afford, and which it so greatly needs, that whoever, without that assistance, attempts to apply the theory to the complete elucidation of phenomena, will be found inevitably committing himself to the most astounding hypotheses? Here I picture to myself a curl on the lip of some advanced Darwinian who, having accompanied me so far, cannot altogether suppress his compassionate scorn at the proposed recurrence now-a-days to a mode of thought so obsolete in the treatment of scientific subjects as the theological. 'Positive biology,' he will perhaps superbly exclaim, repeating the words of Mr. G. H. Lewes, 'declines theological explanations altogether.' Yes, but positive biology is therein very unwise, for as, if the same reader will accompany me a little further, I pledge myself to show, it is the untheological or atheistical, not the theistical, mode of treatment which is here utterly out of place and flagrantly unscientific. Be it, without the slightest reserve, admitted that the formation of almost all, and probably of quite all, existing species is due, and cannot be otherwise than due, to survival of the fittest, the superior fitness of these, moreover, being due to the gradual accumulation of innumerable and, for the most part, exceedingly slight divergencies from the parent stock. But whence and why these divergencies? It cannot be without a cause that even one more feather than the parent possessed appears in the offspring's wing, or a novel tint on its coat, or that the curve of beak or talons is not precisely the same in each. What then is the cause? Unphilosophic people will most likely call it 'all chance,' getting sneered at for their pains, and justly too, as using words without meaning. But are not philosophers themselves doing much the same thing, and merely restating facts which they profess to explain, when, like Mr. Lewes,[40] they talk of the 'specific shape' assumed by an 'organic plasma' being 'always dependent on the polarity of its molecules,' 'or due to the operation of immanent properties;' or declare that, in the process of organic evolution, 'each stage determines its successor,' 'consensus of the whole impressing a peculiar direction on the development of parts, and the law of Epigenesis necessitating a serial development,' insomuch that, 'every part being the effect of a pre-existing, and in turn the cause of a succeeding part,' the reason why, when a crab loses its claw, the member is reproduced, is that the group of cells remaining at the stump 'is the necessary condition of the genesis' of precisely that new group which the reproductive process imperatively requires to follow next in order, this second group equally the necessary condition for genesis of the one required third, the third for the fourth, and so on; and that the reason why the thorns of a blackberry admit of somewhat close comparison with the hooks and spines of certain crustaceæ, is that portions of the integument of both plant and crawfish '_tend_ under similar external forces to develop' into similar forms?

I pass rapidly over one or two minor difficulties that here present themselves. I will not stop to ask how--if reproduction of lost limbs be due to polarity of the molecules, in other words to the direction which in the circumstances of the case the molecules are bound to take, and if the polarity of each particular set of molecules be impressed upon them by the group formed immediately previously--how it is that the group terminating the docked stump of a limb, which group is represented as commencing the work of reproduction, imparts a different direction or tendency to the fresh molecules of nourishment that are supplied to it, from that which it has been accustomed to communicate to previous molecular supplies. Hitherto it has used such molecules solely for the repair of its own waste; now it employs a large portion of them to build up an entirely new fabric. It seems then that molecular polarity is not a fixed but a variable property, and, being such, cannot be inherent or originate in the molecular nature. But I will not linger over this point nor yet over the fact, absolutely unintelligible on the polar hypothesis, that it is comparatively only few animals that are capable of reproducing severed parts. Although the process required, no doubt, is, as Mr. Lewes says, 'in all essential respects the same as that which originally produced' the parts, the last layer of cells left at the place of excision after a human leg or arm has been cut off, lacks the skill to repeat an operation, which according to the hypothesis it has once before performed. It cannot so determine the polarity of the molecules with which it is supplied by the arteries as to constrain them to group themselves into a new layer, instead of merely repairing an old one. A crab or a lobster, or a polype's molecules are clever enough for this, a man's not. Without pressing these objections, but on the contrary, conceding for the nonce and for argument's sake, to molecular polarity, to immanent properties, to Epigenetic evolution, all the efficacy claimed for them, I limit myself to inquiring what causes the various tendencies and directions which these imply. Tendency pre-supposes impulse; direction control. What is it that here imparts the impulse and exercises the control? Whatever else it be, it must, for reasons stated at length on a previous page, be something possessing at least enough of intelligence to exercise volition, and which at least intends that the movements which it originates shall take place, whether it further intends or not the ends which eventually result from the movements. To myself it seems barely conceivable that even the least marvellous of these ends should have been undesigned. Take, for instance, half a dozen _infusoria_ of some exceedingly low type, all individually single cells or sacs of matter perfectly transparent and destitute of any approach to structure that can be detected with a magnifying power of five thousand diameters. Observe how, after feeding for a while, and increasing proportionately in size, one will divide itself in half, each half becoming a separate and complete animalcule, another line itself internally and clothe itself externally with clustered cells, which, by a series of differentiations, traceable through a number of animalcular varieties, eventually exhibit the outlines of respiratory and circulatory systems. To me, I repeat, it seems all but inconceivable, and altogether incredible, that the intelligence which willed these cellular divisions, multiplications, and differentiations to take place, did not foresee what would be their results, and did not will them for the sake of those results. And if I do not deem it still more incredible that there should be _natural_ selection separating the fittest for survival by accumulating upon them slight advantages which qualify them to survive, without there being at the same time a _nature_, or other exalted intelligence, however designated, which selects, and which accumulates advantages upon the objects of its selection, _in order_ that they may survive, it is only because I consider the extremest limits of credibility to have been already passed. But I forget. On reflection I perceive that I am doing scant justice to the elasticity of philosophic belief. How far this is capable of stretching on occasion, let one or two notable Darwinian specimens show.

No single piece of organic mechanism is oftener or more confidently appealed to by Theists as rendering conclusive evidence on their side than the eye, nor would they run much risk by allowing sentence to go for or against them according as Mr. Darwin has or has not succeeded in his attempt to explain that evidence away. Possibly he may disclaim having made any attempt of the kind, and I must admit that it is less by what he says than by what he leaves unsaid, that he lays himself open to the charge. Indeed, in almost all he says on the subject, I myself cordially agree, embracing even some of his views with less of hesitation than he seems to have felt in putting them forward. He seems to me, for instance, to have somewhat gratuitously admitted it to be apparently 'in the highest degree absurd to suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection.' For since, as he proceeds unanswerably to argue, 'numerous gradations, from an imperfect and simple eye to one perfect and complex, each grade being useful to its possessor, can certainly be shown to exist;' since, as certainly, slight variations of the eye do occur, and are inherited, and since of these variations there cannot but be some which are useful to the animal exhibiting them under changing conditions of life, the difficulty of believing in the formation of a perfect and complex eye by natural selection can be little else than a prejudice of the imagination. He proceeds to indicate some probable stages in the assumed process. Some of the lowest organisms, in which no trace of nerves can be detected, are known to be sensible to light, owing, probably, to the presence in the _sarcode_ of which they are mainly composed, of certain elements which, in organisms somewhat higher in the scale, become aggregated and developed into nerves specially endowed with the same sensibility. An optic nerve thus formed, surrounded by pigment cells, and covered by translucent skin, is the simplest organ that can be called an eye, but it is an eye incapable of distinct vision, and serving only to distinguish light from darkness. In certain star-fishes, small depressions in the layer of pigment-cells are filled with transparent gelatinous matter projecting with a convex surface like a rudimentary cornea, and this, it has been suggested, may serve, not only to form an image, but to concentrate the luminous rays. In insects, the numerous facets in the cornea of their great compound eyes have now been ascertained to form true lenses, the cones, moreover, having been discovered to include curiously modified nervous filaments. It is impossible not, in this series of changes, to perceive the appearance of graduation, nor ought there to be much difficulty in believing the apparent graduation to be real, when we consider how few comparatively are the still living forms in which the changes cited have been observed, and how far more numerous the extinct forms by which intermediate changes may have been presented. If there be no extravagance in supposing that natural selection may have occasioned these early steps, neither is there any in supposing that, by continued progress in the same direction, it may at length have fabricated the most perfect optical instrument possessed by any member of the _articulata_. And, if credited so far, why not still further? why not with competence to form a man's or an eagle's eye? So far I am as completely at one with Mr. Darwin in respect to the eye as in respect to any other of the subjects taken by him for illustration. The fact is, however, that in this, as in every similar instance, he has completely evaded the real difficulties of the case. It is not a whit more startling to be told that the most complex eye, with all the latest improvements, than to be told that the earliest rudiment of an optic nerve, may have been formed by the gradual accumulation of minute differences. Only allow time enough for the requisite accumulation, and neither operation is one whit more unintelligible than the other. The difficulty, equally and utterly insuperable in both cases, is to understand how the difference can have been undesigned. 'How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light,' says Mr. Darwin, 'hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated.' Perhaps not; nor, indeed, very well could it, for the second question of the two is surely one of almost unsurpassed concernment; but, at any rate, when either of the two is asked, nothing can be more reprehensible than, by studiously ignoring the only alternative reply, to leave it to be inferred that the nerve made itself, or that life caused itself to live, that both are in short examples of what Mr. Darwin strangely calls '_variation causing alterations_.'[41] Let us briefly consider a few of the results supposed to be attributable to this singular process. The eye, as every reader of course knows, though here and there one perhaps may not be the worse for being reminded, consists of four coats--the _sclerotic_, outermost and strongest, which constitutes the white of the eye; the circular, tough, and coloured, yet pellucid, _cornea_, in the centre of which is seen the pupil; the _choroid_, full charged with black pigment, and lining the sclerotic; the _retina_, an expansion of the optic nerve, lining in its turn the choroid; of the _iris_, a flat membrane, dividing the eye into two very unequally-sized chambers; of a lens termed the _crystalline_, suspended in the posterior chamber immediately behind the iris; and of two humours (also virtual lenses), whereof one, the _aqueous_, is enclosed in the anterior chamber formed by the iris and the cornea, while the other, the _vitreous_, fills the whole of the posterior chamber save what is occupied by the crystalline lens. By what nice interlacement of filaments the fibrous ring that margins the pupil, or aperture through the iris, regulates the admission of light, contracting or expanding, yet always preserving its circular form, according as the brilliance is excessive or deficient; how the humours or lenses are continually varying in figure and relative position so as to concentrate every pencil of light admitted on that point exactly where the retina is spread out to receive it; how, according as the object looked at is near at hand or far off, certain muscles perform quite opposite services, rendering the cornea more or less prominent, pushing the crystalline lens forward or backward, and thereby lengthening or shortening the axis of vision, so that, whether the rays enter divergently from a near object, or parallel from a remote one, they equally fall into focus at the same distance beyond, and equally form on the retina a picture of the object from which they come, perhaps compressing a landscape of five or six square leagues into a space of half an inch diameter, and anon allowing the page of a book or a dinner-plate to occupy the entire field of vision--to these and to any kindred marvels it would be superfluous more than momentarily to refer. Suffice it to note how measureless the superiority, as a mere piece of mechanism, of an average eye to the finest of telescopes, and how just, nevertheless, is the telescope-maker's claim to praise for skilful adaptation to the laws of optics, when he has succeeded in a faint and feeble imitation of some minor part of nature's visual apparatus. Yet nature's original and infinitely more beautiful aptitudes we are forbidden to deem adaptations, being required instead to regard them as self-produced, or, at any rate, as having been undesigned. Now I unreservedly admit that, among all conceivable forms, among the most exquisitely beautiful and most usefully intricate and complex, there is not one which may not possibly have been produced without aim or purpose by the mere restlessness of elemental forces; the amount of probability of their having been so produced being, however, according to the formula already set forth in its proper place, as one to infinity multiplied more or less frequently by itself. But what adequate superlative shall we invent to express the credulity, the credulosity run mad, of those who, in a matter of scientific belief, deliberately accept such odds. Observe how at once extravagantly gratuitous and painfully elaborate such credulosity is; how easily, on the one hand, all its ends could be served by the simple expedient of supposing a superintending intelligence; how, on the other, it compels ingenuity like Mr. Darwin's to entrench itself behind a phrase of utterly unmeaning gibberish.

If you see a man moving slowly, with head down, over an extensive plain, you may fairly suspect that he does not know where he is going, and possibly does not mean to go anywhere in particular. But if you perceive that on reaching a ditch he takes a leap over, you are quite sure that, when leaping, he meant to get to the other side. To that extent his saltatory movement is unequivocal evidence of design. It is perhaps to escape the necessity of a similar inference that Mr. Darwin so frequently quotes the proverb _Natura non facit saltum_; but, if so, he leans on a broken reed--on a bit of proverbial philosophy as weak as the weakest of Mr. Tupper's. That Nature does sometimes make a leap, and a pretty long one, must be obvious to any visitor to the Museum of the London College of Surgeons, who has examined the two-headed and four-legged human foeti there preserved in spirits. It may be said that these are leaps in the wrong direction. Be it so. Still, whoever can leap backward can make an equal leap forward, and most people will find the latter the easier feat of the two. The power, whatever it be, that coupled together the Siamese Twins, and gave to those respected brothers, the late William and Robert Chambers of Edinburgh, twelve fingers and twelve toes apiece, would not have gone at all more out of the way by doing, suddenly and at once, several of those things which Mr. Darwin doubts not that it does slowly and by degrees--by single acts, for instance, instead of by a succession of acts, aggregating into the semblance of an optic nerve certain elements in the _sarcode_ of certain low organisms, spreading out the nerve thus formed into a network or retina, forming a number of separate pigment-cells into a homogeneous cornea, and following up these first steps by others which, how much soever more apparently complex, would cost comparatively little after the earlier and simpler ones had been taken. Now let but the power competent to do these things be credited with sense enough to be aware of its competence, and it may then be regarded as not unlikely to have done some of them on purpose. Whereupon, the genesis of the eye ceases to be a mystery. All the appearances of contrivance that have resulted from the operation find their obvious and complete explanation in the assumption of a contriver, and all such hazy films as that of variability producing variation cease to be capable of serving as excuses for wilful blindness. And why should not the power in question be so credited? Here is Mr. Darwin's solitary reason why. He doubts whether the inference implied may not be 'presumptuous.' He apprehends that we have no 'right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of a man.' Truly, of all suggested modes of marking respect for creative power, that of assuming it to have worked unintelligently is the most original.

The hypothesis offered by Mr. Darwin in explanation of the most perfect of organic structures, is deemed by him to be equally explanatory of the most marvellous of animal instincts. Parenthetically, here, never having as yet met with a definition of instinct which I am able to accept as satisfactory, I make bold to offer a description of my own. Instinct is innate knowledge how to perform any useful actions, accompanied by a tendency or propensity to perform those actions, but wholly unaccompanied by knowledge of any purpose which they can serve. This is pure instinct, an example whereof is afforded by the beaver, of which animal I have somewhere read that one caught when newly born, and brought up by itself in a room in its captor's house, proceeded after a while to build up across the apartment the semblance of a dam, composed of brushes, rugs, billets of wood, and other litter. Pure instinct differs essentially, not in degree only, but in kind, from reason, which is not knowledge, but an instrument for acquiring knowledge. Instinct, however, is rarely if ever found pure, being apparently always accompanied by more or less of reason. Even a polype makes some show of reason by moving its _cilia_ in one mode when it desires to suck in food, and in another when it merely wishes to move on; while it is scarcely possible for an unprejudiced spectator to doubt of its being by a rational deduction from experience that a dog knows that it will get kicked if it presume to snatch at the meat on its master's plate, instead of waiting for the scraps he may be pleased to throw to it when he has done. Instinct by necessary implication involves habit; habit as necessarily always more or less modifies structure; structural modification always may be, and often is, inherited, carrying with it a tendency to the habit out of which itself arose; therefore habit and instinct are likewise heritable. Some instincts are originated artificially. The reason why, on the very first opportunity, a young pointer has been known to point at game, and a young sheep-dog to run round, instead of at, a flock of sheep, is that some of their respective ancestors had been carefully trained so to point and to wheel. These, however, are exceptions to the general rule. Most instincts are of what every one would call natural, and Mr. Darwin calls 'spontaneous' origin, he explaining the meaning of the latter term to be that the slight variations from a primordial type, the accumulation of which is considered by him to constitute actual instinct, are 'variations produced by the same unknown causes as those which produce slight deviations of bodily structure.' But here I am once more compelled to join issue with him. Of the causes which he styles unknown, I maintain that we know at least thus much--either they are themselves intelligent forces, or they are forces acting under intelligent direction; and in support of this proposition I need not perhaps do more than show from Mr. Darwin's example what infinitely harder things must be accepted by those who decline to accept this.

Mr. Darwin, like every really truth-loving controversialist, far from desiring to shroud, invites special attention to any seeming weaknesses in his position; and, therefore, when contending that all the faculties commonly classed as instincts, are exclusively due to natural selection, of course takes care to particularise the cellmaking faculty of the hive bee. And here, again, I gladly bear my humble testimony to the partial success he has achieved. Although bound to protest against the claim set up by him, on behalf of natural selection, to the entire credit of producing the hive bee's most remarkable characteristic, I cannot but think he has succeeded in removing all the apparent difficulties of believing that natural selection's share may have been not less important in that than in any other productive operation in which it takes part.

In popular estimation the hive bee is a heaven-born mathematician which, having been set the problem how to fill a given space with waxen cells with the least loss of room and expenditure of material, arrives by intuition and instantaneously at a solution which Newton himself was ignorant of, and to which, but for his discovery of the fluxional calculus, it would have been impossible for his follower, Maclaurin, to attain. And, doubtless, it may excusably be deemed supernatural that the insect should adopt off-hand precisely that six-sided figure, and precisely that inclination of the angles of the same figure's pyramidal roof or floor, which, only by very refined and recondite investigation, can be scientifically shown to be those best fitted for the purpose. Mr. Darwin has, however, adduced strong grounds for supposing the amazing architectural skill thus displayed to have been acquired, not suddenly, but by the same slow degrees as those which are so clearly traceable throughout organic progress in general. At the lower end of a short apiary series, he observed humble bees using their old cocoons for honey pots, sometimes adding to them short tubes of wax, and likewise making separate and very irregular cells entirely of wax. At the higher end of the series, he saw hive bees making double layers of cells, each cell an hexagonal prism with the basal ends of its six sides bevelled so as to fit on to a pyramid formed of three rhombs, and each of the three rhombs which compose the pyramidal base of a single cell on one side of the comb entering into the composition of one of the three adjoining cells on the opposite side. Intermediately, he found the Mexican _meliponæ domesticæ_ depositing their honey in cells nearly spherical, and of nearly equal sizes. 'These cells, although aggregated into a mass otherwise irregular, are always at such a degree of nearness to each other that they would have intersected or broken into each other if the spheres had been completed. But this is never permitted, the bees building perfectly flat walls of wax between the spheres which thus tend to intersect. Hence, each cell consists of an outer spherical portion, and of two, three, or more, perfectly flat surfaces, according as the cell adjoins two, three, or more cells; and when one cell rests on three others, as from the spheres being nearly of the same size is very frequently and necessarily the case, the three flat surfaces are united into a pyramid rudely resembling the three-sided pyramidal base of the hive bee's cell, and necessarily enter, like the three rhombs of the latter, into the construction of three adjoining cells.' Reflecting on these remarkable gradations, it occurred to Mr. Darwin that if the melipona were to make its spheres of precisely equal sizes, and to arrange them symmetrically in double layers, and were further so to dispose them as that the centre of each should be at the distance of radius x [mathematical symbol 'square root']2 or radius × 1.41421 from the centres of the six surrounding spheres in the same layer, and at the same distance from the centres of the adjoining spheres in the other and parallel layer--then 'if planes of intersection between the several spheres on both layers were formed, there would result a double layer of hexagonal prisms united together by pyramidal bases formed of three rhombs; and the rhombs and the sides of the hexagonal prisms would have every angle identically the same with the best measurements that have been made of the cells of the hive bee.' Then, submitting this view to Professor Miller of Cambridge, he had the gratification of being assured by that distinguished geometer that it was strictly correct. Certainly a very happy example of an ingenious conjecture verified by a species of demonstration hardly inferior to the experimental. Certainly a very valuable testimony to the soundness of all the main and really essential principles of Darwinism. Good cause, certainly, is hereby shown for believing that the cell-making faculty of the hive bee may be nothing more than the aggregate of many minute and successive improvements upon that of the melipona, and this, again, than a similar aggregate of improvements on that of the humble bee; and for believing further that hive bee and melipona may both be either descendants from the humble bee, or joint-descendants with it from some still earlier common progenitor. In order to believe this it suffices to believe that a bee which at one period made, like the humble bee, cells very unequally sized and irregularly rounded, came gradually, in the course of time, to make them as nearly equal in size and as nearly spherical as those of the melipona; and subsequently, during a further lapse of time, came to arrange them at the same distances from each other, and in double layers like those of the humble bee. To assume thus much requires no inordinate stretch of faith; and thus much being assumed, it is seen at once that the hive bee, requiring for its cells only about half as much wax as the humble bee does, and consequently only about half as much honey for the secretion of the requisite wax, would, in a struggle for existence, leave the humble bee so little chance that in all probability the two species would nowhere coexist, were it not for the special resource derived by the humble bee from possession of a trunk long enough to enter the nectaries of certain flowers, which the shorter trunk of the hive bee is unable to tap. But though there be no difficulty in assuming the improvements in question to have gradually taken place, and to have become aggregated in the manner supposed, there is, to my mind, an insuperable objection to supposing that successive generations of bees should have successively adopted the improvements without either having the sense to know what they were doing, or being prompted by some superior intelligence that did know. I will not be so superfluous as to exaggerate the difficulty. Passing over the earlier stages of the process, and confining myself to one or two of the later, I will content myself with showing how infinitesimally small, when magnified to the utmost, are the chances in favour of these having been passed through blindly. I will admit it to be possible that in a society of purely meliponish habits, there might, in virtue of one or other of those inscrutable causes classed under the general name of spontaneous variation, arise some two or three individuals with an innate propensity to make accurately spherical and equally sized cells; that these individuals, if either males or fertile females, and not sterile neuters, might help to generate others with the same propensity, these again generating others, and so on, until the greater part or the whole of the community became possessed of the same constructive aptitude. I will admit further that, in virtue of the same inscrutable causes, individuals, at first few, but gradually increasing in number, might similarly be born with the additional tendency to make cells at the same, and that the most appropriate, distance from all adjoining cells; and will freely acknowledge that the bees, modifying their previous mode of construction, as meliponæ necessarily would do under these altered circumstances, would construct a layer of cells similar in all respects to those on one side of the hive bee's comb, except that their bases would be flat instead of pyramidal. Further, I admit that the bases would become pyramidal in case the bees should set about constructing double instead of single layers of cells on the same principle. Not a little liberality is required for these admissions. For, in the first place, the fact of the bees having acquired the habit of making perfect and equally sized spheres would not of itself be of any obvious benefit either to individual bees or to the society at large: in order that it should enable material and labour to be saved it would have to be accompanied by the habit of making the cells at special distances from each other. And, in the second place, though some few individuals should present themselves with an innate tendency to choose these special distances, whatever advantage might result therefrom, whatever saving of material or labour, would be shared in equally by the whole community, the particular individuals to whom it was due benefiting by it no more than any of the rest, and not being, in consequence, more likely than they to survive in any struggle for existence, or to leave behind them offspring inheriting their special characteristics. No help, therefore, can be derived from Mr. Darwin's principles towards conjecturing why a small minority of such specially endowed bees should be gradually converted into a majority, and should eventually constitute the whole community, thereupon becoming in fact converted into a new species. Let us, however, liberally waive this and all similar objections, and assume a community of hive bees to have been, in the utterly unaccountable manner indicated by the term spontaneous variation, developed from a meliponish stock. Unfortunately, all our liberality will be found to have been thrown away without perceptibly simplifying the problem to be solved. For, whatever be among meliponæ the distribution of the generative capacities, among hive bees, at any rate, all workers are sterile neuters, which never have any offspring to whom to bequeath their cellmaking skill, while the queen bee and drones, which alone can become parents, have no such skill to bequeath. Clearly the formula of 'descent with modification by natural selection,' is, in its literal sense, utterly inapplicable here. In whatever manner the cell-making faculty might have been acquired by the first homogeneous swarm of hive bees, it must inevitably have terminated with the generation with which it commenced, if transmission by direct descent had been necessary for its continuance. The only resource open to Mr. Darwin is to suppose, not merely (what is, indeed, obviously the fact) that queen bee after queen bee, besides generating each in turn a progeny of workers endowed with instincts which their parents did not possess and could not therefore impart, generated also princess bees destined in due season to generate a working progeny similarly endowed with instincts underived from their parents; but to suppose further that all this has happened in the total absence of aim, object, intention, or design. Now that all this should have so happened, although not absolutely inconceivable, nor, therefore, absolutely impossible, is surely too incredible to be believed except in despair of some other hypothesis a trifle less preposterous. It is surely not worth while to set the doctrine of probabilities so completely at naught, for the sake of an explanation which avowedly leaves every difficulty unexplained, referring them all to causes not simply unknown but unconjecturable. What excuse, then, have philosophers, of all people, for doing this in preference to the simple expedient of supposing that, although the parturient bee, queen or other, cannot intend that any of her progeny should be more bounteously endowed than herself, there is an independent intelligence that does so intend? To content oneself with pronouncing such preference to be eminently unscientific is tenderness of language nearly akin, I fear, to literary bathos.