words: "Natural Selection can render each organized being only as perfect as or a little more perfect than the other inhabitants of the same country; and against which they must continually struggle for existence. Now such is in effect the degree of perfection attained by Nature. The aboriginal productions of New Zealand, for example, are perfect if we compare them among one another, but they are on the way to disappear before the continually increasing number of plants and animals introduced by the Europeans. Natural Selection cannot produce absolute perfection—it can only produce a relative superiority ; that is, a degree of perfection measured by the local re

"This quotation establishes very clearly, and in a double way, the limit of the effects as we have laid it down. It points out even the true cause of perfection, in affirming that it is measured by the local resources' (237).

Thus does M. Trémaux censure Mr Darwin, and in his remarks on the struggle for life, with convincing arguments. Even when he confronts his own Theory with that of Mr Darwin, it is with some degree of success, for M. Trémaux has something substantial to present to the reader, as every one acknowledges that soil can improve, though scarcely any one but M. Trémaux would affirm that it can form or transform organized beings. The soil can do something, Natural Selection nothing; and it is amusing to find that Mr Darwin occasionally invokes the assistance of the soil to eke out the deficiencies of Natural Selection.

CHAPTER X.

STRICTURES ON MR DARWIN'S THEORY.

We have now to return to Mr Darwin's Theory, and still further to examine its claims to our acknowledgment of its authority as an interpreter of Nature.

M. Flourens has well said,* Natural Selection is only Nature under another name' (31); and again, Either Natural Selection is nothing, or it is Nature, but Nature endowed with the attribute of Selection-NATURE PERSONIFIED, which is the last error of the last century; the nineteenth century has done with personifications' (53).

This is indeed an exact analysis of Mr Darwin's metaphor. Natural Selection is organization, and selects itself.

Now that Natural Selection is indeed Nature, in this Theory, and nothing more, is evident not only from the general course of the argument, and the statements with which it is supported, but from some passages of the author which leave no doubt on the subject. Having spoken of Nature in the previous sentence, he goes on to say, 'she can act

Il

* 'L'élection naturelle n'est sous un autre nom que la nature. Pour un être organisé, la nature n'est que l'organisation, ni plus, ni moins. faudra donc aussi personnifier l'organisation, et dire que l'organisation choisit l'organisation. L'élection naturelle est cette forme substantielle dont ou jouait autrefois avec tant de facilité. Aristote disait que "si l'art de batir était dans le bois, cet art agirait comme la nature." A la place de l'art de batir M. Darwin met l'élection naturelle, et c'est tout un : l'un n'est pas plus chimérique que l'autre' (p. 31).

on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good, Nature only for that of the being which she tends. Every selected character is fully examined by her, and the being is placed under well-suited conditions of life.'

Could studied language, seeking to express the personality of Nature, and to endow her with discrimination and accurate judgment, go further than this? Take again this statement :

'Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by his powers of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the co-adaptations between all organic beings, one with another, and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by Nature's power of Selection' (115).

Here the personification rises in intensity: if feeble man' can do much in improving domestic animals and plants, how much more can powerful Nature do in the way of mutation, having so great a measure of time for her operations. Observe, that powerful' is implied in the contrast to feeble man;' and observe, also, that the argument also urges that if man selects, and by selection produces improved and beautiful varieties, much more can Nature do in this way; implying that she is much more intelligent, and wise, and has a more refined eye for beauty, than the artificer man. But whence comes this beauty?' We have already seen that Natural Selection spurns beauty, that beauty is no part of the design of Nature, and that if it were so, it would be fatal to the Author's Theory, by his own confession. How then

comes it that there would be no limit to the beauty' of organized beings? On such a system we should rather have expected that there would be no limit to the ugliness.' And how comes it that we, the most exalted and improved of apes, have come to appreciate beauty and to admire it, and to be fascinated with it in form, colour, harmony, contrivance, and adaptation? who gave us this faculty to admire beauty? Natural Selection was our maker, and yet Natural Selection takes no account of beauty; how can we have got any faculty but as we derived it by improvement from our forefathers, the anthropoidal patriarchs of the tropical forests? Is it an improvement to comprehend and admire beauty? It either is or is not an improvement; if it is, then Natural Selection, which disregards beauty, improved us by enabling us to value it! Our creatrix, therefore, improved us by making us esteem that which she disapproves! Surely this must be regarded as a mistake. Or if it be not a mistake, then it is no improvement to have an eye and a taste for beauty; and the blue-tailed baboons, and the howling monkeys, and the hideous gorillas are superior to us in the satisfaction they feel in their fiendlike females.

But this is not all: if feeble man can do much by his powers of selection,'-what does man do? He makes varieties, and cannot make anything more, and if he withholds his hand the varieties disappear; but Nature, according to the Theory, makes new species. Here then is implied, that which is implied throughout the whole Theory, that variety and mutation are the same. When we produce by cultivation a new variety of a rose, we know how far we have gone, and we know that we have not made a new species, and cannot do so; but if a rose

were to be gradually transformed into some new flower, never yet heard of or seen, and to become a new species of a new plant-a very possible and probable event in this Theory-then a transformation would have been accomplished; though to improve and to change are

opposite propositions. When therefore Man and Natural Selection are thus brought together in comparison, the comparison fails: Man varies and can do no more; Natural Selection changes the Nature and quality of organized beings; she has her department (in the Theory), and to this we can never approach.

We must take another instance of this abuse of language: 'It has been asserted, that of the best shortbeaked tumbler pigeons more perish in the egg than are able to get out of it, so that fanciers assist in the act of hatching. Now if Nature had to make the beak of a fullgrown pigeon very short for the bird's own advantage, the process of modification would be very slow, and there would be simultaneously the most rigorous selection of the young birds within the egg, which had the most powerful and hardest beaks, for all with weak beaks would inevitably perish, or more delicate and more easily broken shells might be selected, the thickness of the shell being known to vary like every other structure' (92).

If Nature had to make! that is, if it were her inclination so to do, she would rigorously select' hard-beaked young birds or weak shells. Can personification go beyond this? and yet, after all, we must remember both here and in all other passages, that Natural Selection is only 'the sequence of events as ascertained by us.' So then we have the sequence of events setting about to make pigeons