to cur own upon. every subject connected with art, science, philosophy, and religion; it is plain, therefore, that if posterity is to be pleased, it can only be at the cost of repelling some present readers. Unwilling as I am to do this, I still hold it the lesser of two evils; I will be as brief, however, as the interests of the opinions I am supporting will allow.

In Life and Habit I contended that heredity was a mode of memory. I endeavoured to show that all hereditary traits, whether of mind or body, are inherited in virtue of, and as a manifestation of, the same power whereby we are able to remember intelligently what we did half an hour ago, yesterday, or a twelvemonth since, and this in no figurative but in a perfectly real sense. If life be compared to an equation of a hundred unknown quantities, I followed Professor Hering of Prague in reducing it to one of ninety-nine only, by showing two of the supposed unknown quantities to be so closely allied that they should count as one. I maintained that instinct was inherited memory, and this without admitting more exceptions and qualifying clauses than arise, as it were, by way of harmonics from every proposition, and must be neglected if thought and language are to be possible.

I showed that if the view for which I was contending was taken, many facts which, though familiar, were still without explanation or connection with our other ideas, would remain no longer isolated, but be seen at once as joined with the mainland of our most assured convictions. Among the things thus brought more comfortably home to us was the principle underlying longevity. It became apparent why some living beings should live longer than others, and how any race must be treated whose longevity it is desired to increase. Hitherto we had known that an elephant was a long-lived animal and a fly a short-lived, but we could give no reason why the one should live longer than the other; that is to say, it did not follow in immediate coherence with, or as intimately associated with, any familiar principle that an animal which is late in the full development of its reproductive system will tend to live longer than one which

reproduces early. If the theory of Life and Habit be admitted, the fact of a slow-growing animal being in general longer lived than a quick developer is seen to be connected with, and to follow as a matter of course from, the fact of our being able to remember anything at all, and all the wellknown traits of memory, as observed where we can best take note of them, are perceived to be reproduced with singular fidelity in the development of an animal from its embryonic stages to maturity.

Take this view, and the very general sterility of hybrids from being a crux of the theory of descent becomes a stronghold of defence. It appears as part of the same story as the benefit derived from judicious, and the mischief from injudicious, crossing; and this, in its turn, is seen as part of the same story, as the good we get from change of air and scene when we are overworked. I will not amplify; but reversion to long-lost, or feral, characteristics, the phenomena of old age, the fact of the reproductive system being generally the last to arrive at maturity-few further developments occurring in any organism after this has been attained-the sterility of many animals in confinement, the development in both males and females under certain circumstances of the characteristics of the opposite sex, the latency of memory, the unconsciousness with which we grow, and indeed perform all familiar actions, these points, though hitherto, most of them, so apparently inexplicable that no one even attempted to explain them, became at once intelligible, if the contentions of Life and Habit were admitted.

Before I had finished writing this book I fell in with Professor Mivart's Genesis of Species, and for the first time understood the distinction between the Lamarckian and Charles-Darwinian systems of evolution. This had not, so far as I then knew, been as yet made clear to us by any of our more prominent writers upon the subject of descent with modification; the distinction was unknown to the general public, and indeed is only now beginning to be widely understood. While reading Mr. Mivart's book,

however, I became aware that I was being faced by two facts, each incontrovertible, but each, if its leading exponents were to be trusted, incompatible with the other.

On the one hand there was descent; we could not read Mr. Darwin's books and doubt that all, both animals and plants, were descended from a common source. On the other, there was design; we could not read Paley and refuse to admit that design, intelligence, adaptation of means to ends, must have had a large share in the development of the life we saw around us; it seemed indisputable that the minds and bodies of all living beings must have come to be what they are through a wise ordering and administering of their estates. We could not, therefore, dispense either with descent or with design, and yet it seemed impossible to keep both, for those who offered us descent stuck to it that we could have no design, and those, again, who spoke so wisely and so well about design would not for a moment hear of descent with modification.

Each, moreover, had a strong case. Who could reflect upon rudimentary organs, and grant Paley the kind of design that alone would content him? And yet who could examine the foot or the eye, and grant Mr. Darwin his denial of 'forethought and plan?

For that Mr. Darwin did deny skill and contrivance in connection with the greatly preponderating part of organic developments cannot be and is not now disputed. In the first chapter of Evolution, Old and New I brought forward passages to show how completely he and his followers deny design, but will here quote one of the latest of the many that have appeared to the same effect since Evolution, Old and New was published; it is by Mr. Romanes, and runs as follows:

"It is the very essence of the Darwinian hypothesis that it only seeks to explain the apparently purposive variations, or variations of an adaptive kind."1

The words "apparently purposive" show that those organs in animals and plants which at first sight seem to have Nature, 12th November 1885.

1

been designed with a view to the work they have to do-that is to say, with a view to future function-had not, according to Mr. Darwin, in reality any connection with, or inception in, effort; effort involves purpose and design; they had therefore no inception in design, however much they might present the appearance of being designed; the appearance was delusive; Mr. Romanes correctly declares it to be "the very essence" of Mr. Darwin's system to attempt an explanation of these seemingly purposive variations which shall be compatible with their having arisen without being in any way connected with intelligence or design.

As it is indisputable that Mr. Darwin denied design, so neither can it be doubted that Paley denied descent with modification. What, then, were the wrong entries in these two sets of accounts, on the detection and removal of which they would be found to balance as they ought?

Paley's weakest place, as already implied, is in the matter of rudimentary organs; the almost universal presence in the higher organisms of useless, and sometimes even troublesome, organs is fatal to the kind of design he is trying to uphold; granted that there is design, still it cannot be so final and far-foreseeing as he wishes to make it out. Mr. Darwin's weak place, on the other hand, lies, firstly, in the supposition that because rudimentary organs imply no purpose now, they could never in time past have done sothat because they had clearly not been designed with an eye to all circumstances and all time, they never, therefore, could have been designed with an eye to any time or any circumstances; and, secondly, in maintaining that "accidental, "fortuitous, 99 66 spontaneous" variations could be accumulated at all except under conditions that have never been fulfilled yet, and never will be; in other words, his weak place lay in the contention (for it comes to this) that there can be sustained accumulation of bodily wealth, more than of wealth of any other kind, unless sustained experience, watchfulness, and good sense preside over the accumulation. In Life and Habit, following Mr. Mivart, and, as I now find,

Mr. Herbert Spencer, I showed (chap. 14) how impossible it was for variations to accumulate unless they were for the most part underlain by a sustained general principle; but this subject will be touched upon more fully later on.

The accumulation of accidental variations which owed nothing to mind either in their inception, or their accumulation, the pitchforking, in fact, of mind out of the universe, or at any rate its exclusion from all share worth talking about in the process of organic development, this was the pill Mr. Darwin had given us to swallow; but so thickly had he gilded it with descent with modification, that we did as we were told, swallowed it without a murmur, were lavish in our expressions of gratitude, and, for some twenty years or so, through the mouths of our leading biologists, ordered design peremptorily out of court, if she so much as dared to show herself. Indeed, we have even given life pensions to some of the most notable of these biologists, I suppose in order to reward them for having hoodwinked us so much to our satisfaction.

Happily the old saying, Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret, still holds true, and the reaction that has been gaining force for some time will doubtless ere long brush aside the cobwebs with which those who have a vested interest in Mr. Darwin's reputation as a philosopher still try to fog our outlook. Professor Mivart was, as I have said, among the first to awaken us to Mr. Darwin's denial of design, and to the absurdity involved therein. He well showed how incredible Mr. Darwin's system was found to be, as soon as it was fully realized, but there he rather left us. He seemed to say that we must have our descent and our design too, but he did not show how we were to manage this with rudimentary organs still staring us in the face. His work rather led up to the clearer statement of the difficulty than either put it before us in so many words, or tried to remove it. Nevertheless there can be no doubt that the Genesis of Species gave Natural Selection what will prove sooner orlater to be its death-blow, in spite of the persistence with which