nature similarly to convert any ordinary bird, a thrush say, into a woodpecker-only by the struggle for existence! Is it conceivable is it not absurd? If the fancier were deprived of the power of pairing, is there any simulation of a struggle for existence possible to him that would still accomplish his purpose?

It is at least natural to shrink from agreement with the putting of such weight on the accidental variation of the individual in wind and weather, and at the beck and bidding of every common contingency. Of course the fact of such variations never gives a moment's doubt it is only the weight of the enormous responsibility with. which each singly superficial accident is to be supposed burdened, that arrests conviction. Of course all varies, nothing remains the same, no two things are the same; but this march from a single external abstract ace of accident to a concrete internality of plan? We do see accidents of the individual daily; but they all revert. Despite every accident the individual still remains in the bosom of the species. A blackbird shall appear in your garden with a white feather, but it will also disappearnot but that such a variety may elsewhere exist, as in Arcadian Cyllene ! But really thousands and thousands of such accidents we see revert, and daily too. Deformed parents may reappear in perfect Phoebuses of children. The left-handed father may have a dozen right-handed If the first Strabo squinted, or the original Pætus blinked, so, in all probability, did not the last. Plancus, Plautus, Pansa, Scaurus, Varus, Valgus are all illustrious names enough: it is pretty certain that not every one that bore them was like the first of each, either plainsoled, or splay-footed, or spread-toed, or duck-ankled, or knock-kneed, or bandy-legged. These are the sort of variations feigned, and not one of them but reverts.

sons.

It is true also that Mr. Darwin has still a word to

interpose here. It was the freedom of cross that kept bat and seal up to type; and so it is the like freedom of cross in great communities that wipes out special marks. Isolate these particularised individuals, and the particularity might not revert. It is not so certain, again, for all that, that isolation has any such power. Consult the references to isolation in the Life and Letters; and Mr. Darwin will be found, as he says himself, to "oscillate much." At one time (iii. 160) he was "all for isolation "—at another he “doubted much."

Certainly, too, it is the case that if isolation is to be the principle relatively effective, it is not well possible to place that principle more favourably than in the Galapagos. I question, and on his own showing, the partial isolation from island to island; but there can be no question in regard to the continent of South America and the insular archipelago in itself generally.

Again, nevertheless, even so, may not the simple conditions really do all that Mr. Darwin would ascribe to his own ingenuities of conception? I have urged this in the Lectures. If strange conditions are at all to act, surely no stranger conditions can be found than those that these islands display. Mr. Darwin himself, as we have seen (Journal, p. 492) "can hardly doubt" that the imported rats and mice "have varied from the effect of the new conditions to which they have been exposed;" and if these, why not also the remarkable finches? Then what of the tortoises and lizards, which likewise are so peculiar? "From what country" the latter arrived -if they did arrive "it is impossible to say, as their affinity is not very clear to any known species," and it is out of the question to think, in their connection, of the monstrous lizards of the Secondary Epochs. The huge tortoise, again, is called "aboriginal," "it is found nowhere else in this quarter of the world." "It may be

questioned," Mr. Darwin avows, "whether it is in any other place an aboriginal." One asks with astonishment, then where did it come from? No South American type will account for it here. And, pullulation of individual differences; are we to suppose that it pullulated out of the bare rock?

Altogether, neither in the Galapagos, nor, in general, anywhere else, can Mr. Darwin put us at home with mere incidental variation, mere pullulation of differences, as the satisfactory and convincing origin of species.

CHAPTER XI.

CRITICISM OF NATURAL SELECTION

CONTINUED.

So much for (a) the variation. We come now to (b) the natural selection as such.

To this part of the process Mr. Darwin, as we saw, though not altogether consciously (at least in connection), gave two forms. Variation was continued into new species: Either, first, as successful in the struggle for existence; Or, second, as naturally divergent into a new place (character, relation, rôle). In either form we are to see the process as the selection on the part of nature of the variation of the organism that is so variedinto an application, a function, a purpose, a use, that is necessarily correspondently varied.

The whole question, then, is of the truth of this. Can the subjects of such variations as are daily exemplified around us, and as we see spontaneously to happen, be really conceived to emerge into new species? Can such variations as we are supposed actually to see ever conceivably determine the subjects of them into new species ?

Mr. Darwin finds that he must make strong play with the idea of gradation here. "For the life of me, I cannot see," he says (ii. 304), "any difficulty in natural selection producing the most exquisite structure, if such structure can be arrived at by gradation." If-but can

it ? With such an if it is easy for us imaginatively to deceive ourselves. What is gradation? and what are its powers? Of course, it is understood that these questions are limited here to what concerns life, and the organs and organisms of life. Gradation quantitatively, qualitatively, or quantitativo-qualitively, is a wide matter, and not in the question at present. There are gradations of homogeneous quality-motion, for example-which to us are absolutely inconceivable. Say light travels at the rate of 200,000 miles in a second, we cannot in any way mentally image such a fact. Suppose the Channel to be a gap of twenty miles, is it conceivable that if we were as swift as light, we could pass from England to France and back again five thousand times in a pulsebeat? When the wind blows at the rate of a hundred miles an hour, it is called a hurricane, and it tears up trees, levels houses to the ground, etc. etc. If it is so violently destructive at less than a mile in a second, what would be the result if it moved even 20,000 times less swift than light? It would certainly blow the Atlantic into the clouds, with the Pacific to follow. Rather it is simply impossible. Conditions must cohere with conditions; and for such a tempest on the globe, the conditions on this side and on that are utterly incoherent.

From these and other the like infinitely possible calculations, it is evident that there must be allowed some consideration of correlative conditions as mutually compatible before we can accept the terms of conception or imagination which we see Mr. Darwin at once give himself. He cannot, he says, set bounds to the possible production of any the most exquisite structure, on the part of natural selection, if only "such structure can be arrived at by gradation;" and we see now that there are necessary limitations to gradation in homogeneous