must therefore be very careful to remember that the tail of the horse, or the cow, or the giraffe, grew very slowly; and this of course means geological slowness. But a cow or horse with a tail only the hundred-thousandth part of its present length would not reap much benefit from the addition: it would only be appreciable by a powerful microscope, and would be of no advantage to its proprietor as far as we can see. Let us suppose that at the end of some thousand years a cow's tail had grown an inch long, it would certainly avail nothing for the flagellation of insects, nor can we see any reason why this slowly-improving cow or horse should by this slight variation' gain the victory in the competition for existence; nevertheless, cows' tails grew by Natural Selection, till at last they came to be those instruments which we now see them to be, mutatis mutandis. This sort of history is applicable to every animal-to the trunk of the elephant, the horns of the deer, the hoof of the horse, &c.

This, however, incidentally lets us into a secret, that in all these dreams of transformation a prospective advantage is always implied, as is obvious in this history of tails. No organ can be made suddenly, that is a fundamental rule in the theory; nevertheless, every remarkable organ has been slowly advancing in its formation, till it becomes the instrument requisite for some particular purpose, and then it advances no more. This implies, and means, that there is a design somewhere. Mr Darwin may shrink from this as he likes, but his slow growth of organs tending to an object, and that growth ceasing when the object is obtained, means only slow design. Mr Darwin may flatter himself that his millions of ages may conceal this, but it only makes apparent, that when any one tries to explain

the productions of nature without a design he has an impossible task on his hands, and that it is impracticable to frame such a theory without occasionally admitting the principle which it is especially intended to exclude.

But this history of animals has greater marvels still, for not only had many of these terrestrial creatures an aquatic origin' (215), but some land-animals have changed their original nature, and become aquatic. If we should be startled by hearing that a giraffe was once a fish, full as great must be our surprise to hear that a whale was once a bear. In North America,' we are informed, 'the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water, I see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered by Natural Selection more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.'* This appeared in the first edition of the Origin of Species, but has been suppressed in the subsequent editions, for no sufficient reason, as far as we can discern. It is in perfect harmony with all the rest of this wonderful creed, and is not one whit more ridiculous than many other statements reprinted in the last edition. The reader would be puzzled in endeavouring to strike the balance of absurdity between the origin of tails and the parentage

* In the third and subsequent editions the passage is thus given :— 'In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, almost like a whale, insects in the water' (202).

The transformation is thus omitted. Nevertheless, the statement is left now as suggestive of the transformation, for it follows immediately a passage in which the author suggests the probable change of many birds. Indeed, if it does not convey this hint, the whole passage seems to want a

purpose.

of the whale. This, however, is not to be forgotten, that when the ursine-whale began his career, he must have had his tail to make: and this would be just the reverse of the other story. The land-animals derive their tails from the waters, having originally been fishes; but in this case, a land-animal goes into the water to procure a tail, and live like a fish.

But we must still for a while keep to our text :

'In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas

Corpora-'

Thus we are told that the penguin, by natural selection, became a swift-flying bird (324); and we are assured, more than once, that the horse and tapir, the camel and the pig, are joined together by family-ties' (324); but whether the pig is descended from the horse or the camel, or the pig is progenitor of the tapirs, or the tapir of the horse, or vice versa, or whether they all sprung from a common progenitor, is not certain. However, this is certain-according to the theory, that not only something of this sort has taken place, but that we are all of the same family, and that we have ties of descent with the elephant, the bat, the porpoise, the giraffe, and the crab-we all spring from one progenitor, and we are branches of one great family. The frame-work of bones being similar, in the hands of a man, wing of a bat, fin of the porpoise, leg of the horse, the same number of vertebræ for the neck of the giraffe and elephant, and innumerable other such facts at once explain themselves on the theory of descent, with slow and slight successive modifications. The similarity of pattern in the wing and leg of a bat, things used for such different purposes, and in the jaw and leg of a crab, and the petals, stamens, and pistils of a flower, is intelligible on the

view of the gradual modifications of parts and organs, which were alike the progenitors of each class.'

Here is a curious assemblage!-men, bats, porpoises, giraffes, horses, crabs, elephants, and flowers all mixed up together. In this medley we may pick and choose our parents or first cousins, according to our inclination; or if the list should appear circumscribed, we may add the tapir and pig and camel-'closely joined together by family-ties with the horse; and with this handsome list of ancestors, we may be able perhaps to account for the dif ferent dispositions which we find in ourselves, our friends, and acquaintances.

That our origin is aquatic is an established point in the theory, so that when we thoroughly understand this, we need not be so much surprised to find ourselves, as well as giraffes and elephants, associated in genealogy with crabs and porpoises. All physiologists admit that the swimbladder is homologous, or ideally similar, with the lungs of the higher vertebrate animals;' hence there seems to me to be no extreme difficulty in believing that Natural Selection has actually converted a swim-bladder into a lung. On this view it may be inferred that all vertebrate animals having true lungs have descended by ordinary generation from an ancient prototype, OF WHICH WE KNOW NOTHING, furnished with a floating apparatus or swim-bladder' (210).

The proof drawn from an ideal similarity' leading to a progenitor, of which we know nothing,' and so endowing us all with lungs instead of swim-bladders, which our unknown progenitor possessed, is very convincing; and perhaps we might suggest as corroborating the proof of our aquatic origin, that we are disposed to call an ec

centric person
the ancient traditions of the family.

'an odd fish'-doubtless with reference to

But if swim-bladders have been transformed into lungs in the higher vertebrata, the branchia (of the fishes and crustacea) have wholly disappeared . . . and it is conceivable that the now utterly lost branchiæ might have been worked in for some quite distinct purpose. . . it is probable that organs which at a very ancient period served for respiration, have been actually converted into organs of flight' (211).

All this, however, relates to anatomical structure and the adaptation of organizations. We now must turn our attention to outward form and comeliness, which has not originated in any design to produce the beautiful; for ‘nature cares nothing for appearances' (87), but it is to be attributed to a cause which never would have been suspected. Beauty amongst birds and beasts, and I suppose fishes and insects too, originates in the preference of the females for handsome males! The birds of Paradise and some others congregate, and successive males display their gorgeous plumage, and perform antics before the females, which, standing by as spectators, at last choose the most attractive partner. Sir R. Heron has described how one pied peacock was eminently attractive to the hen birds. I can see no good reason to doubt that female birds by selecting, during thousands of generations, the most melodious or beautiful males, according to their standard of beauty, might produce a marked effect. Thus, then, I believe, that when males and females of any animal differ in structure, colour, or ornament, such difference has mainly been caused by sexual selection; that is, individual males have had, in successive generations, some slight ad