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the hive-bee should visit its flowers. Thus I can understand how a flower and a bee might slowly become, either simultaneously, or one after another, modified and adapted in the most perfect manner to each other, by the continual preservation of individuals presenting mutual and slightly favourable deviations of structure' (100).

One would think that this passage must, even to its author, appear a reductio ad absurdum of the system. Red clover finding itself in a state of hopeless celibacy, owing to the absence of humble-bees, begins slightly modifying its structure to meet a prospective slight modification of the structure of the hive-bee. The hive-bee, with great good nature, begins to alter its own organization in order to meet the inclinations of the red clover; and thus by this simultaneous process of slow modification on the part of the flower and the insect, they become 'perfectly modified and adapted to one another.' A profitable arrangement to both parties, as the bee gets the honey, and the red clover fertility!' But this of course is not accomplished without the usual slaughter on both sides, for it is by the 'continual preservation of individuals presenting mutual and slightly favourable deviations of structure,' that is, some millions of races of bees, and some millions of crops of improving red clover, are continually undergoing extermination, till at the end of a million or more of years red clover and hive-bees are perfectly adapted to one another.

One cannot but admire, in this picture, the spirit of self-sacrifice in the hive-bees, for as they get on very well with the present arrangement, and have done since the be ginning of things, without the red clover, one can see no

reason why they should give themselves up to extermination for a million of years, to obtain that which they do not want. It is, moreover, to be remembered that the breed of improving bees must depend on the queen, the sole mother of the hive. She, therefore, who never gathers honey herself and never visits any flower, must have resolved to lay eggs, which shall produce insects kindly intentioned to the red clover, &c., &c., &c.

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And this is the system which is to banish the belief of the creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden modification of their structure' (101).

These specimens of the mode of reasoning by which the Theory is upheld will be sufficient, though there is no lack of

many similar statements if it were requisite to adduce them. We have seen enough to convince us that the argument of design, which it is in many quarters now the fashion to deride as puerile and obsolete, is largely used where it is least of all admissible, in the dogmas of that school which pretends to have mapped* out creation on an atheistic plan; and that the leaders of that school are continually talking of contrivancest without a contriver, of plans and adaptations without intellect to devise them, and of beauty and skill in organized structures, though they declare that premeditated beauty and skill would be fatal to their theory. The attributes of power and wisdom, hitherto considered inseparable from the Creator, they

* Mr Darwin speaks of 'Nature worked out by Natural Selection.'— Orchids, 278.

† 'No one who advanced so far in philosophy as to have thought of one thing in relation to another, will ever be satisfied with laws which had no author, works which had no maker, and co-ordinations which had no designer.'-Phillips' Life on the Earth, 43.

ignore; and invent another power which is but an allegory, and has only a verbal existence, and yet they scruple not to say that they can see no limit to THIS POWER (Natural Selection) in slowly and beautifully adapting each form to the most complex relations of life' (502).

This advantage, then, at any rate, we have in arguing with Mr Darwin, that we believe there really is a Power that can, and has done, all these things, by supreme exercise of intellect and will; Mr Darwin does not believe this, and yet he continually is making use of language implying that he does believe it.

The explanation of this is, that he feels by the force of reason that to be necessary and indispensable which his Theory condemns.

This great question of design brings us ultimately to the beginning of life, which Mr Darwin calls the Origin of Species, and which it is the professed object of his book to explain. In this, as we have seen, he has failed, as he has only explained up to a certain point, which does not reach the origin. He tells us of a primordial spore of the lowest algæ from which all animal and vegetable life was evolved, but the origin of the great parent he leaves untouched.

It is, however, a remarkable circumstance that in the edition of his work of the year 1859, from which Professor Phillips has made his quotations, and from which many

Every naturalist who has dissected some of the beings as now ranked very low in the scale, must have been struck with their really wondrous and beautiful organization (135).

'Whenever the period of activity comes on, the adaptation of the larvæ to its conditions of life is just as perfect and beautiful as in the adult animal' (472).

others have made theirs, there was some further information on this subject which has been since withdrawn. In the edition of 1859 we read it thus: All living things have much in common in their chemical composition, &c. ; therefore I should infer from analogy that the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form into which life was first breathed.' All the words from therefore' to the end of the sentence, have been suppressed in the subsequent editions; and in addition to this a long paragraph ending with this sentence, there is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been, and are being evolved.'

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With this statement we should inquire, of course, how was life breathed into the first forms: surely, in a point of the system of such transcendent importance, Mr Darwin cannot here also be talking allegorically-he must have meant what he says, that life was breathed from a source that had power to give it. Whether there was an allusion here

to the language of the Scripture, must be left to surmise, but certain it is that the whole paragraph is cancelled, and that we now read the important sentence thus: Therefore on the principle of Natural Selection with divergence of character, it does not seem incredible, that from some such low and intermediate form, as the lower algæ, both animals and plants may have been developed-and if we admit this, we must admit that all organic beings which have ever lived on this earth may have descended from some one primordial form' (519).

Now all this is very curious as showing how the author of this Theory is unsettled on the main point, the Origin of Species. At first, as he saw the necessity of an original mover and a real commencement of life, we were informed that life was breathed' into the first forms; but subsequently, and in consequence perhaps of perceiving that this statement was a virtual contradiction of the Theory, we are told that all life descended from one form-leaving that one form to acquire life as best it might.

The Theory, therefore, is in a more consistent dress at present, and does not contradict itself at starting; but it is far more absurd, for we now see the origin of all things traced to a sea-weed, which of course sprung from another sea-weed, and so on backwards for millions of millions of ages, for sea-weeds either sprung from some other form, and therefore they cannot be the first themselves, or they existed for ever without beginning, or they were created. There is, however, another alternative-and it is that of spontaneous generation. M. Pouchet-who is a Transmutationist of the School of Lamarck-pure, and without admixture, openly defies* the scientific world to find any other alternative; either creation, says he, which is a miracle, or 'successive evolution of Lamarck.' Now this successive evolution is from spontaneous generation, and of this doctrine M. Pouchet is a conspicuous advocate. Nevertheless, he is quite right in his logic, that there is no other alternative. Mr Darwin,† however, does not accept spon

*Nous defions qu'on sorte de cette alternative, ou la création instantanée et miraculeuse d'un certain nombre d'animaux parfaits, ou l'évolution successive, c'est à dire l'idée de Lamarck, modifiée dans le sens des connaissances nouvelles que resument à notre époque, d'un coté la geologie, et de l'autre l'anatomie philosophique.'-Pouchet, La pluralité des races humaines, 182.'

+ 'Lamarck was led to suppose that new and simple forms were con

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