for the benefit of society, there was one remarkable exception. One female there was who, by a long preconcerted scheme, though by a most occult and undiscoverable process, was all the while prodigiously increasing her fertility in order to become the sole Mother and Queen of the whole hive! We should have to imagine fertile animals agreeing to produce, and actually producing, sterile offspring! "The fertile males and females flourished; and transmitted to their fertile offspring a tendency to produce sterile members!" Fertile parents transmit, through fertile progeny, a tendency to produce sterility incapable of further production! "Humorous"? Not at all. The theory requires it, and therefore, quite seriously, Mr. Darwin "believes it."

By one of his earliest and acutest critics it was justly observed, that "If we except a passing cavil at the imperfect knowledge of optics displayed in the mechanism of the eye, Mr. Darwin can scarcely be said to have touched the evidence for design deduced from the felicities of fabric and deep-lying adjustments, so profusely exemplified throughout the animal kingdom. He tells us indeed how the pigeon's feather may be varied, but not how the pigeon came to be feather-clad at all. He leaves us

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quite in the dark also as to the mode in which natural selection sets to work in the multiplying of air-sacs, or in the boring of bones, to increase the facilities for flotation and flight. But he devotes a large portion of a chapter on Instinct, otherwise extremely graceful and interesting, to a hypothetical exposition of the processes by which the common hive-bee, Apis mellifica, might have distanced her less skilful kindred Melipona and Bombus; and how the wonderful phenomena of sexual suppression and vicarious labour might have arisen among the social instincts of the bee and ant tribes generally. No one, since Touchstone's time, has set such store on the virtues, or so taxed the capacities, of an If. A certain abstract theorem conceded, if Bombus or Melipona could be brought to put that theorem in practice, one huge stumblingblock would be removed from Mr. Darwin's speculative path. But this is the hitch. It is as much out of the question for 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;1 but, indifferent alike to savant and satirist, Melipona was then building her cells no better, and Mellifica no worse. 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. 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 1 "Clouds," 147–153.

2 "Origin of Species," p. 242.

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

1 Mr. Darwin, in noting the fact that "the neuters of several ants differ, not only from the fertile females and males, but from each other, sometimes to an almost incredible degree," says, "The difference between them is the same as if we were to see a set of workmen building a house, of whom many were five feet high, and many sixteen feet high-but we must further suppose that the larger workmen had heads four times as big as those of the smaller men, and jaws nearly five times as big.""Origin of Species," pp. 260, 261.

mother; and he would 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."

Turning now from the disordered dreams of unpruned fancy to the severities of observation; from ingenious suppositions of what might have been, to the actual certainties that are; we find all Comparative Anatomy tending towards the recognition and extrication of three supreme values, in the grouping of animals, and the graduation of life, past as well as present:— the BACKBONE, the BREAST, and the BRAIN. And the key to the significance of animal life and its prerogatives, thus grouped and graduated, is not, and cannot be, Selective Development, but is, and must be, Elective Design.

"The first leet, in the ascending order, takes note of all animals, as Vertebrates or Subvertebrates for every individual organism endowed with a backbone, there are countless millions without it. Hence this first or exterior