It may be objected, perhaps, that these difficulties are difficulties of ignorance-that we cannot explain them because we do not know enough of the animals. But it is here contended that this is not the case; it is not that we merely fail to see how Natural Selection acted, but that there is a positive incompatibility between the cause assigned and the results. It will be stated shortly, in illustration of this incompatibility, what wonderful instances of co-ordination and of unexpected utility Mr. Darwin has discovered in orchids. The discoveries are not disputed or undervalued, but the explanation of their origin is deemed thoroughly unsatisfactory-utterly insufficient to explain the incipient minute beginnings of structures which are of utility only when they are considerably developed. Let us consider the mammary gland, or breast. Is it conceivable that the young of any animal was ever saved from destruction by accidentally sucking a drop of scarcely nutritious fluid from an accidentally hypertrophied cutaneous gland of its mother? And even if one was so, what chance was there of the perpetuation of such a variation? On the hypothesis of Natural Selection itself, we must assume that up to that time the race had been well adapted to the surrounding conditions ; the temporary and accidental trial and change of conditions which caused the so-sucking young one to be the "fittest to survive" under the supposed circumstances, would soon cease to act, and then the progeny of the mother with the accidentally hypertrophied sebaceous glands, would have no tendency to survive the far outnumbering descendants of the normal ancestral form. If, on the other hand, we assume the change of conditions not to have been temporary but permanent, and also

assume that this permanent change of conditions was accidentally synchronous with the change of structure, we have a coincidence of very remote probability indeed. But if, again, we accept the presence of some harmonizing law simultaneously determining the two changes, or connecting the second with the first by causation, then, of course, we remove the accidental character of the coincidence.

Again, how explain the external position of the male sexual glands in certain mammals? The utility of the modification, when accomplished, is problematical enough, and no less so the incipient stages of the descent.

As was said in the first chapter, Mr. Darwin explains the brilliant plumage of the peacock or the humming-bird by the action of sexual selection: the more and more brilliant males being selected by the females (attracted by this brilliancy) to become the fathers of the next generation, to which generation they tend to communicate their own bright nuptial vesture.1 But there are peculiarities of colour and of form which it is not possible to account for

1 In the opinion of the author of this book, Mr. Darwin has utterly failed to show (in his most recent work) that sexual selection acts efficaciously in modifying species, if indeed it acts at all. Certainly, even in birds, sexual peculiarities occur which cannot be due to sexual selection; as, e.g. the colouring of the inside of the mouth in the Hornbill (Buceros bicornis), and the excess in size, in male pigeons, of the wattle of the "Carrier" and the crop of the "Pouter," an excess not arising "from, but rather in opposition to, the wishes of the breeder." Mr. Darwin himself tells us, "I have received long letters on this subject from Messrs. Hewitt and Tegetmeier, and almost an essay from the late Mr. Brent. It will be admitted by every one that these gentlemen, so well known from their published works, are careful and experienced observers. They do not believe that the females prefer certain males on account of the beauty of their plumage." "Mr. Tegetmeier is convinced that a game-cock, though disfigured by being dubbed with his hackles trimmed, would be accepted as readily as a male retaining all his natural ornaments."-Descent of Man, vol. ii. p. 117.

by any such action. Thus, amongst apes, the female is notoriously weaker, and is armed with much less powerful canine tusks, than the male. When we consider what is known of the emotional nature of these animals, and the periodicity of its intensification, it is incredible that a female would often risk life or limb through her admiration of a trifling shade of colour, or a slightly greater though irresistibly fascinating degree of wartiness.

Yet the males of some kinds of ape are adorned with quite exceptionally brilliant local decoration, and the male orang is provided with remarkable, projecting, warty lumps. of skin upon the cheeks. As we have said, the weaker female cannot be supposed to have developed these by persevering and long-continued selection,1 nor can they be thought to tend to the preservation of the individual. On the contrary, the presence of this enlarged appendage must occasion a slight increase in the need of nutriment, and in so far must be a detriment, although its detrimental effect would not be worth speaking of except in relation to "Darwinism;" according to which, "selection" has acted through unimaginable ages, and has ever tended to suppress any useless development by the struggle for life.

In poisonous serpents, also, we have structures which, at all events at first sight, seem positively hurtful to those

1 Mr. Darwin, in his recently published work on Man, though he abundantly notices these ape sexual characters, does not bring forward a single fact in support of selection on the part of such animals. He assumes that sexual selection has acted in them because he is convinced that it acts in birds. We may, however, turn the argument round and say, since such characters can be formed in apes (as they certainly also are in insects) without the action of sexual selection, the unknown eause which has operated in their case may, most reasonably, be supposed to have also acted in the case of birds.

reptiles. Such are the rattle of the rattlesnake, and the expanding neck (or hood) of the cobra, the former seeming to warn the ear of the intended victim, as the latter warns the eye. It is true we cannot perhaps demonstrate that the victims are alarmed and warned, but, on Darwinian principles, they certainly ought to be so; for the rashest and

e

RATTLESNAKE.

most incautious of the animals preyed on would always tend to fall victims, and the existing individuals being the long-descended progeny of the timid and cautious, ought to have an inherited tendency to distrust, amongst other objects, both "rattling" and "expanding" snakes. As to any power of fascination exercised by means of these

actions, the most distinguished naturalists, certainly the most distinguished erpetologists, entirely deny it, and it is opposed to the careful observations of those known to us.

The mode of formation of both the eye and the ear of the highest animals is such that, if it is (as most Dar

winians assert processes of development to be) a record of the actual steps by which such structures were first evolved in antecedent forms, it almost amounts to a demonstration that those steps were never produced by "Natural Selection."

The eye is formed by a simultaneous and corresponding ingrowth of one part and outgrowth of another. The skin in front of the future eye becomes depressed; the depression