Bombus or Melipona, not being a man, to see with Mr. Darwin's eyes, as it would be for Mr. Darwin, not being a bee, to work with Melipona's tools. Slight deflexions of habit, artificially provoked, in the more highly endowed insect, do not furnish the smallest presumption of the genesis of new endowments in its inferior sisterhood. "It may easily be supposed," in these researches, is but a sorry substitute for, "It has actually been observed." The true tokens of consummate geometrical prescience can never be simulated by tentative effort. Had Mr. Darwin lived two thousand years ago, his ceral experiments might have furnished a target for the shafts of Aristophanes; 59 but, indifferent alike to savant and satirist, Melipona was then building her cells no better, and Mellifica no worse. 60 Those explanations of the mystery of cell-making which really explain nothing are, however, moderation itself to the inimitable though unconscious legerdemain which converts an unanswerable and unblunted objection to our author's favourite solvent, drawn from the phenomena of insect sterility and caste, into the occasion of a panegyric on its power. It is his business to prove that natural selection has done certain wonderful things: See, he virtually says, what wonderful things, far beyond my own expectation, natural selection can do. 61 A more flagrant intrusion of unpruned fancy into a domain sacred to the severities of observation can scarcely be conceived. The social insects, like those lower in the scale, must have started, on Mr. Darwin's view, as ordinary male and female, with a common share of individual labour; on a par, in this respect, with a flock of geese, or a herd of cattle, or a community of mankind. 'Now let any breeder of cattle consider through what agencies a variety could be attained, of which only one birth in five should be a bull or a cow, the other four being natural neuters, devoted subjects of their perfect sister, but sworn foes of her spouse. It is an aptitude precisely analogous to this that has produced, we are asked to believe, the economy of the bee-hive. Or let any transatlantic admirer of the "domestic institution" of Formica rufescens, turn over in his mind the means by which every third man-child born on his estate should be ten times the size of the rest of the family; or each alternate female be fitted for a nurse while forbidden to be a mother; and he will have the measure of the intrinsic likelihood of the Darwinian doctrine, in its bearing on that insect and its confederates. It were idle to enlarge. There are worthier lessons to be gleaned from the world of instinct than such as affront all legitimate analogy, and gratuitously dissociate the marvels of nature from their only true solvent, the ordination of God. Who made the spider parallels design, Heavens not his own, and worlds unknown before? God, in the nature of each being, founds Thy arts of building from the bee receive, Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave; Learn of the little nautilus to sail, Spread the thin oar, and catch the driving gale : Here, too, all forms of social union find, And hence let Reason, late, instruct mankind: There towns aerial on the waving tree : The ant's republic and the realm of bees. 62 30. Nothing then appears more certain from the examination of nature than that each creature has an orbit assigned to it, the attempted transgression of which would be, not the improvement of the species, but the destruction of the individual. A frog trying to select The pelican itself into an ox would not thereby become bovine: it would simply burst. How strange, on Mr. Darwin's scheme, that such aspirings are confined to the region of fable, and that no animal has ever been seen on the road which such countless myriads must have travelled between the old species and the new! Why has no creature ever been caught in transitu? feeding its young from its bosom, however beautiful in ecclesiastical symbolism, is unknown to all but legendary lore. On the principle of natural selection, as has been pertinently observed, a protracted exercise of the pugnacious propensity ought to improve the weapons of attack; and yet the antlers of the red-deer now alive in Windsor Forest are no whit better than those found in the "submerged forest - lands which date back long before the beginning of our English history." After "63 an exposure to modifying influences of the most powerful kind, including the companionship of man, the dog, as if to show that no such influences can make a creature other substantially than the Maker made it, is what it was in the days of the Pharaohs. The anatomical approach to the human species, which reaches its permitted maximum in the higher quadrumana, was as evident to Ennius 64 as to Mr. Rogers or Mr. Darwin. But then, as now, (not to anticipate the inquest for a more profound partition) the four "graspers" of Pithecus and Troglodytes, the most anthropoid of apes, were very different instruments from the true hand and foot, as specialized and distributed in man. There is also a world of meaning in the enormous development of the canine tooth in the male gorilla or orang: all the more clearly from their being frugivores, it is a weapon which 65 Showing the great canines in the latter (Orang). marks the brute. 66 If we consider, besides, the climatic limitations, so rigidly imposed on the quadrumana, derivation from the dog will seem as credible as from the ape. The dog, like his master, is a citizen of the world, and can be acclimatised everywhere. But the ape is chained to the tropics; 67 and could no more diffuse his offspring throughout the Temperate latitudes than man himself could colonize the peaks of the Alps, or found flourishing cities at the North Pole. F |