of a living being's habits to its habitat home in moorland or woodland, pasture, depends largely, especially in animals, on meadow, or seashore. Sand, peat, chalk, its outward form and size, which again gravel, hard or soft water, the sea-level, depend on the internal growth of bone, or ten thousand feet above it, are almost muscle, or other organic tissue. To this equally acceptable to this contented and must be added the growth of some suit- adventurous little plant. The two kinds able integument, as the fur of the bear, of adaptation thus exemplified are widely the scales of the fish, the skin of the diverse. The cosmopolitan plant or aniearthworm, the shell of the snail. Be- mal will have a superior share of wide hind this set of adaptations (which as re- distribution: that which has special local gards their utility may be called mechan- fitness will have the pull upon its imme ical) lies a totally distinct set-namely, diate neighbors, as daisies and plantains the adaptation of the organs of nutrition stifle the grass on our lawns. In some and circulation to produce these struc- plants the constitutional adaptation is tures and keep them (and themselves also) such as to leave them without competitors in constant effective repair. How are - they grow where nothing else will; as these distinct sets of adaptations ex-sea-meadow grass on loose sand-hills, or ternal and internal-geared together so ivy-leafed toad-flax and pellitory on old as to work to one end? Accepting, for castle walls. In all cases, supposing natargument's sake, natural selection as the ural selection a reality, the pre-existing true account of the origin of species- adaptation or adaptability is its sine quâ and not species only, but genera and all non. larger classes of living things it is conNo blunder can be more unscientific cerned with the "battle of life," the than to ascribe to a given process the adaptation of each organism as a whole power of producing its own indispensable to the outer world. What light, even im- antecedents. But this is precisely what aginary, does this shed upon that secret is done when natural selection is opposed inward force and process by which the to creative design as the cause of the minute parts are every moment being "adaptation of the organism to its enformed so as to produce this whole? vironment." How can a sane thinker persuade himself This fallacy becomes more glaring that natural selection, granting it to be when we turn the question on its other the actual law of life, can explain or side, and look from the organism to its account for those processes which are environment. How comes it to be possithe very condition of its existence? ble for organized life to adapt itself to its Clearly, if the plant or animal had not surroundings? Simply because the surthe power of maintaining (as well as pro- roundings, through processes stretching ducing) all its parts in harmony, and of (as we cannot but infer) through illimitavarying them, as far as it does vary them, ble ages, have become, such as to minister harmoniously, natural selection could to life. Even at this moment, a very never begin to come into play. Yet it is slight and easily conceivable change in these internal processes and structures, our surroundings such as the raising in which vital action, chemical action, and of the temperature of the ocean to boilmechanical action are so marvellouslying-point — would speedily render all life harmonized and subordinated (in the impossible on this globe. On examining animal) to sensation and voluntary action, these surroundings, we find that the which display design, skill, and intellectual order to a degree nowhere surpassed. Something still more subtile lurks behind. What may be called "constitutional " adaptation lies utterly beyond the ken of our science, and yet is one of the most palpable and familiar facts of organic life. Let any one transplant from the moors to an ordinary garden a few flourishing plants of bird's-eye primrose, or of butterwort, or water a root of parsley fern for a few months with hard spring water; and he will soon see the reality of this impalpable principle illustrated. The plants

forces and materials of the inorganic universe are as replete with marks of design and other evidence of the all-controlling presence of MIND, as the structure and functions of organic beings. They even present them on an overwhelmingly grander scale. They are so legible, so incapable of any reading but one, that if man's intellect is not at liberty to interpret their meaning, nature becomes an unintelligible show, and science itself loses all high intellectual value and sinks to the rank of agriculture or manufacture.

will sicken and die. The humble little Everywhere we find the existence of tormentil, on the contrary, makes itself at | LAW, or rather of laws; each force, each

atom, each compound, conforming to its It would insult the reader to remind own laws, while these are co-ordinated him that this vast extent and variety of under higher and more wide-reaching facts presents no hair-breadth of room for laws. But what is a law? A form of natural selection. A historian who should thought. It can exist only as a product of mind. To suppose that a force or an atom is a law to itself, regulating the result of its own activity, so as to co-ordinate it with that of totally distinct and independent elements and forces, is absurd. To deny the actual existence of law. -a hierarchy of laws-throughout the universe, is to annihilate science. Is it not irresistibly plain that but one conclusion is scientifically possible? A universe resting on law must rest on mind.

propose to explain the history of England by the proportion of our native population who have blue eyes, would have as good a case (if not better) as a philosopher who pretends to explain the appearance of supernatural design throughout the whole extent of God's universe by the theory of natural selection.

It is often overlooked or forgotten that in the physical universe every existence, every occurrence, every line of hereditary life, is individual. Every scientific truth But behind and beneath the domin- stands for an infinite multitude of actual ion of physical law lies something apart facts; every law for an infinite number of from which law, force, and matter could events; every specific, generic, or larger never build a platform for organic life — type for a countless multitude of individnamely, the precise qualities and exact ual living units. Yet nature presents to proportions of the elemental forms of us the appearance of a vast ORGANIC matter. Now these as distinctly present WHOLE, whose unity depends not on physthe character of being arbitrary-i.e., ical necessity, but on delicate adjustfixed by an exercise of will and foresight ments and complicated adaptations, which as the choice of materials and calcula- (as we have seen) are essentially inteltion of proportions in any human work. lectual and arbitrary; involving relations The actual quantity and relative propor- of number, size, speed, distance, equilibtions (for example) of oxygen, hydrogen, rium, proportion, the balance of forces carbon, nitrogen, and calcium, are among which determines strength of material, the primary conditions of life on this and the all but infinite relations involved earth. The inseparable qualities which in chemical compounds and vital strucfit these (and other) elements to be woven tures. It is consequently at the same into the web, built into the structure, time an INTELLECTUAL WHOLE, in which moulded into the forms, of animal and we may be absolutely certain that every vegetable life, are at once latent and inex-fact and law is intelligibly consistent haustible. They come out only at the (supposing our knowledge complete, and mutual call of each atom not to its fel- our intellect competent to grasp it) with lows, but to those utterly unlike. And every other. And it is a MORAL WHOLE: after all the work which inorganic atoms a system of benevolent foresight and have done during millions of years in mutual ministry.* building up living forms, they emerge unchanged, neither improved nor deteriorated.

Take a fact of a totally distinct kind. The size (including weight) of our globe is as accurately adjusted to the flight of a butterfly as to the earth's distance from the sun and speed in its orbit. But on these, with the slant of its axis, and its speed of rotation, depend temperature, climate, winds, rain, rivers, seasons, with all their vital influences, as well as those electric or magnetic conditions of life of which as yet we know so little. The entire inorganic platform on which organic life is built, bears as fully and clearly the marks of ARTIFICIAL CONSTRUCTION q. d. of being the product of thought, foresight, and will as the structure of the hand, the ear, the eye; or the composition of sap, milk, flour, or gastric juice.

II. I shall presently be able, I hope, clearly to prove that, even supposing the

Another comprehensive and profoundly impressive plants and animals. view of design is presented by the mutual relations of The constitution of the atmosphere is equally indispensable to each order of life; but each draws in from the air that which sustains its own life and is death to the other, and returns that which to itself is useless or poisonous, but which to the other is the breath of life. The relations of herbivorous and writer whom I have before quoted has the hardihood to say that "if all, or even some, species had been so organic species might then have been likened to a interrelated as to minister to each other's necessities, countless multitude of voices all singing in one harmo nious psalm of praise. But, as it is, we see no vestige of such co-ordination; every species is for itself, and for itself alone-an outcome of the always and everywhere fiercely raging struggle for life." This reckless assertion is refuted by the flavor of every peach, the chemical composition of every morsel of our daily food; by the labor of every earthworm ploughing his dark path underground; by the structure of every wheat politics, public and family life of nations depend. "Sic plant storing the food on which the labor, commerce, vos non vobis mellificatis apes !"

carnivorous animals are another illustration. Yet a

Should it be discovered, as it is conjectured, that the process was immeasurably longer, slower, and more complicated than has been supposed, and that

doctrine of natural selection true, it does | imagines that each species of plant or not in the slightest degree weaken the animal was created out of nothing. At evidence of supernatural design even all events, if this be what is intended by within the range of facts which it covers. "independent creation of species," the Wide as that range is, it is limited in first chapter of the Bible teaches nothing comparison with the universe. And I of the sort. Each creature is there reptrust it has been plainly shown that to resented as formed out of pre-existing the immense bulk of the evidence the material; man himself being distinguished theory of natural selection has no appli- by the spirit inbreathed into him by God. cation. Let us now examine the bearing There was some process whether slow upon the fundamental doctrine of natural or rapid - by which the successive types theology (and of revealed no less) of that of life were embodied. Nor does any wider theory known under the name of Bible-taught believer in a Creator hold organic evolution, to which that of natural that creative power is restricted either to selection is supplementary. It is confi- the first origin of matter, or the producdently asserted that the establishment of tion of new forms of life. According to this doctrine will annihilate the proof Scripture, the all-pervading power of the which the structure of the whole universe Creator is the mainspring of the uniand of its several parts, down to the verse; and its balance-wheel his all-consmallest, has been supposed to furnish. trolling oversight. In the noble images In that case, "Natural theologians can of Holy Writ, he opens his hand and no longer adhere to the arguments of they are filled with good; he sends forth such writers as Paley, Bell, and Chalmers, his spirit, "they are CREATED;" with without deliberately violating the only him is the fountain of life. logical principle which separates science from Fetishism." Is this true? Is there even a particle of solid warrant for these confident assertions? Let us see. The hypothesis of "organic evolution "the chain of animal life is one, these may be briefly stated as follows. The inconceivably varied multitudinous forms of life in the midst of which we find ourselves are the lineal offspring of earlier and less developed forms, and those again of yet simpler forms; so that if we could trace, link by link, the whole chain, or rather network, of organic existence back to the time when our earth first became capable of sustaining life, we should see it narrowing as it ascended, and should find the primeval parents of all living beings in certain nodules of animated jelly, such as the modern naturalist dredges from the ocean, and examines with feelings akin to those of a Chinaman looking at the images of his ancestors. Nowadays, unhappily, jelly-fish produce nothing but jelly-fish. But had that gelatinous morsel been fated to live, say a million or a couple of millions of centuries earlier, it might have been the progenitor of the race from which Homer and Plato, David and Paul, Shakespeare and our eminent professor, have in their order been evolved.

Whatever objections may lie against this hypothesis, it cannot justly be accused of being in itself atheistic. Impartially regarded, it casts no shade of uncertainty on the evidence of design presented to organic nature. No intelligent believer in a Creator, I suppose,

truths would be unaffected. The length
of a process does not account for it.
Long or short, it must have an adequate
cause. If the nest and eggs, say of a
thrush or, nightingale, and the wings,
legs, stomach, eyes, beak, and other
organs of the birds that built the nest
and laid the eggs, are brimful of those
intricate and delicate adjustments, which
are to common sense the unmistakable
proof of design; then this proof would
in no wise be affected if it could be
shown that the thrush was hatched from
the egg of a lizard, which lizard sprang
from the spawn of a fish, the fish from
the egg of a snail, the snail from a sea-
anemone, which at first was nothing but
a speck of live jelly. Reason must deal
with the facts before us the bird, with
its nest and eggs - however they came
about. And if, instead of half-a-dozen
miraculously violent steps (which I beg
pardon of my evolutionist friends for even
imagining), the process has been con-
ducted with imperceptible slowness,
through myriads of minute transforma-
tions, the principle is the same.
may attenuate the impression of the evi-
dence as you thin gold wire by drawing
it out to a prodigious extent; but you do
not lessen its quality or impair its reality.
If the results show design, common sense
tells us that design must have pervaded

You

that I seem to be avoiding the very crux of the dispute, the hypothesis by means of which it is hoped that the idea of cre

the whole process. Why should it be
accounted either philosophic or scientific
to fly in the face of common sense?
Circumstances, it is pleaded, are suffi-ative wisdom may be eliminated, and evo-

cient to account both for the process and
for its results. But before this plea can
be allowed, three questions must be satis-
factorily answered: 1. How are the cir-
cumstances themselves to be accounted
for? 2. In what consists their modifying
power over living tissue? 3. Above all,
how comes the living tissue, already defi-
nitely organized, to be capable of modify-
ing its organization to suit the circum-
stances? To these crucial questions, it
is needless to say, no reply is forthcom-
ing.

lution shown to have been self-acting: the doctrine, to wit, of natural selection. Purposely I have separated the general idea of evolution from the particular supplementary idea of natural selection; because to lump them together merely begets confusion. Let us now see if the conclusions we have reached are in any way affected by the doctrine which on its first publication many of us admired as a tour de force of human ingenuity, but which has since been adopted with faith as enthusiastic and sometimes as intolerant as though it were the newest dogma of the Infallible Church.

Many of the most striking facts of zoology and botany, recent and fossil, though they cannot prove as fact, yet harmonize What is needed, in fact, in order to acwell with the conjecture that the subordi- cept the doctrine of natural selection is nation of type to type, of species to gen- rather faith and imagination than logic. era, genera to broader classes, points Nevertheless, it starts from a basis of unback to a real genealogical succession. doubted fact. First, it is an undoubted Why should this not have been the crea- fact that an incomparably greater number tive process? Supposing it was, what the of living germs come into being than can facts point to is not a gradual tentative possibly reach maturity. Millions of modification, by which a creature would millions of seeds are ripened more than rather be unfitted for its present sur-the surface of the earth can supply with roundings than fitted for any other; but a room to grow; millions of millions of aniseries of distinct steps, at each of which mals are born, beyond what can find food the new-born creature was definitely and or even breathing and standing space. perfectly adapted to its condition. What- The many perish on the threshold, or at ever was the process, as each new type some early stage of existence; the few appeared, the mould in which it was cast survive to maturity, and in their turn prowas broken, and the seal of permanence duce offspring. Hence it is assumed that set upon it. At all events, if the process there must be an incessant universal was carried on gradually and tentatively, "struggle for life." And it is further aswe find no record of its failures. In each sumed that in this struggle the weaker case the result is as accurate as though plants and animals must always be worstnot simply each species, but each individ-ed, and the "fittest must survive." ual, were independently created. It may even be argued that on this view the marvels, as well as the evidences, of supernatural design are indefinitely augmented, because what is on the common view presented simply as plan, here appears likewise as process.

CREATIVE EVOLUTION, therefore, is a perfectly intelligible and legitimate by pothesis. It is as perfectly in harmony with "

the arguments of such writers as Paley, Bell, and Chalmers" (and, I may add, with the first chapter of Genesis), as any hypothesis of "independent creation of species." Natural theology can have no possible quarrel with any hypothesis which seeks rationally and reverently to trace the lines along which almighty power has been guided by omniscient wisdom.

III. The reader may here remind me

A second undoubled fact is, that some species of plants and of animals have an astonishing plasticity (so to speak)-a capacity of varying so widely, in form, color, size, habits, and in the internal constitution and structure on which these outward modifications depend, that if the different types thus developed were dis. covered in a wild state, naturalists would unanimously assign them to different species or even genera. Familiar examples are the breeds of dogs, some of them quite recent, some of immemorial antiq. uity; and of pigeons, all comparatively recent; or in the plant world, the foodproducing properties of certain grasses (wheat, rice, oats, etc.), and the faculty which many flowers possess (as roses, pinks, daisies, dahlias) of doubling, by changing stamens into petals, or fertile florets into barren but showy ones.

The

processes by which these remarkable | the differences which mark off species results are obtained are artificial, often from species, genus from genus, are by requiring the most patient ingenuity and no means identical with the differences incessant care. They are carried on by man for his own service or pleasure, not for the benefit of the creatures. In some cases, as in the double flowers, the development is destructive. The double-flowering plant, having lost the power of producing seed, can be continued only by such artificial means as striking cuttings, or dividing roots. Sometimes qualities are developed which might be useful to the creature in a wild state; as for instance, the speed and keen sight of the greyhound, perhaps counterbalanced by his less hardy constitution. But, in all cases, these artificial breeds of plants and animals, left to themselves in natural circumstances, will from our point of view degenerate," but in reality will be regenerated,―i.e., their progeny will tend to revert, more or less completely, to the type of their wild ancestors.

66

which give either to species or to individuals special advantages in the struggle for life; as of course on the theory of natural selection they ought to be. Sometimes they are, which makes it the more significant that commonly they are not. Fourthly, the new varieties developed by man's labor are unstable, always tending back to the original type; whereas species and genera are permanent. Not but what well-marked natural varieties sometimes arise which wear such an appear. ance of permanence that (as in the case of certain English brambles) even the most accomplished naturalist may be deceived into ranking them as species. But on the disappearance of the circumstances which developed them, they vanish, and the specific type reasserts its stability.

Mr. Darwin has, upon occasion, shown courageous frankness (or what M. de It is assumed that what man does for Quatrefages calls “almost chivalrous loyhis own service and pleasure, nature (what-alty") in stating some unanswerable objec ever that word may mean) can do for the benefit of the plants and animals themselves. It is assumed that the limited, though considerable, capacity of modifica. tion on which man practises in the case of a few species actually belongs, in unlimited degree, to all species. It is assumed that nature has from the beginning been incessantly at work in thus modifying living forms; and that some, at all events, of these modifications must give the plant or animal so modified an effective advantage in the struggle for life. And finally, it is assumed that not only these fittest individuals survive, but that the modifications themselves survive, and are permanently inherited, constituting the characters of a new species.

The objections to this formidable series of assumptions are both obvious and weighty. First of all, the argument from man to nature, from artificial processes to natural (the very argument which natural theology is blamed by its critics for employing), is rationally intelligible only on the supposition that behind "nature" is a supreme designing mind and controlling will. Secondly, if nature has thus worked in the past, so energetically as to evolve all existing species, the same process ought to be taking place now; evolving before our eyes, if not new species, at all events modifications tending to produce new species. It is ridiculous to say that the process goes on too slowly for us to detect it. Does it go on at all? Thirdly,

tions to his theory. Having thus dis charged his duty, he calmly takes leave of them, and goes serenely on his way. Some expounders of his doctrine pursue the simpler plan of ignoring all facts which tell against it. Let us combine these methods; forgetting the objections I have already briefly indicated, and shutting our eyes to others equally formidable. Let us have faith. Let us give scope to imagination. Let us picture to ourselves this mysterious selecting process presid ing through illimitable ages over the evolution of organized life. We behold it building up the microscopic cells of protoplasm into jelly, nerve, flesh, blood, bone, cartilage, shell, hair; into sap, wood, bark, pith, leaves, flowers, seeds; evolving the gauze of the gnat's wing, the sheen of the humming-bird, the feathers, claws, beak, and eyes of the eagle; the blubber of the whale; the lithe backbone and poison-fangs of the snake, the lark's song, the rose's splendor, the violet's perfume, the flavor of the peach; the latent power stored in every grain of wheat, if permitted to grow and multiply unchecked for a few years, to spread a table at which the whole human race might feed. Multiply these examples by millions of millions in endless variety of form, size, color, material, grain, organ, habit, mechanism. These results, so fragile yet so enduring, so exquisite in beauty, rich in benevolent adaptation, accurate and intricate in mu. tual balance, have been (and are every