qualities or homogeneous quantities. Much more, then, must there be consideration of such limits when the question is of heterogeneous entities, and of heterogeneous entities, different structures, that are organised and live. Mr. Darwin pointedly derives all the great kingdoms, the one from the other that certainly with Hæckel in the end, if, as to Lyell, only with modest guardedness in the beginning. On this authority we are to conceive, then, that we can very well reach a man from a sponge-by gradation of structure! Similarly the liver may be regarded as but a transformed heart, or, vice versa possibly, the heart as but a transformed liver; at the same time that the competing claims of kidney, prostrate, or uterus are righteously not to be ignored. A cocoa-nut is but a big cherry stone; and Oken is sure that the teeth are but the toes of the head. 'Mammary glands," says Nicholson (p. 568), "are regarded by Huxley as an extreme modification of the cutaneous sebaceous follicles." These are sebaceous follicles, the little black pin's points which, detected at times on cheek or brow, fair fingers may elect, as "black heads," to express. Such huge udder, with its half-dozen dugs, and the pin's point of a "black head" side by side, must we not admire the modest fortitude that can name their modification only "extreme" ?

So, by simple gradation it is also that an eye is an eye! Lyell (ii. 207) notices this: "the formation of the eye by such variations as those of which a cattlebreeder avails himself!" He would be a clever cattlebreeder who would know where to begin-what knob to catch at, what dimple to dip into. And yet (ii. 339 and iii. 25)" our ignorance is so profound, why one form is preserved with nearly the same structure, or advances in organisation, or retrogades, or becomes extinct" (for all is at the bidding of natural accident

and chance). "Forms" (ii. 210 and 311) "do not necessarily advance;" "there can now be simple organisms still existing," nay, "the one primordial prototype of all living and extinct creatures may be now alive "—in fact (i. 311) "natural selection is not perfect in its action, but tends only to render each species as successful as possible in the struggle for life." What we have so often seen, namely, a simple casual variation as such may somehow chance to hit-quite naturally-into the conditions of its environment in some new way which shall give it an advantage in the supposed struggle for existence. And it is in this way that an eye is

created!

Not Lyell alone, but the perfectly open Asa Gray is shocked here. He says (ii. 272): "What seems to me the weakest point in the book is the attempt to account for the formation of organs, the making of eyes, etc., by natural selection; some of this reads quite Lamarckian." Mr. Darwin himself is obliged to confess (p. 273) that he is in the same respect not very differently minded: "About the weak points I agree: the eye to this day gives me a cold shudder; but when I think of the fine known gradations, my reason tells me I ought to conquer the cold shudder." (But does reason do so to others?)

It is sufficiently curious that we should find quoted in Lactantius opinions to the same effect on the part of opponents: "There is nothing providential to be perceived in the construction of the living animal; the eyes. are neither created for the purpose of seeing, nor the ears for hearing, the tongue for speaking, or the feet for going; all these members come much earlier than seeing, hearing, speaking, or walking take place." "Man meint hier," is Zöckler's referent remark, "einen perfecten jüngfer Darwins oder Häckels zu hören." As we saw already, the "enlightened" Diderot is no such

disciple. This is the French which he objects to Spinoza : Or c'est pourtant la dernière des absurdités de croire et de dire, que l'œil n'a pas été fait pour voir, ni l'oreille pour entendre." Of course there is always the possibility of a little fencing on the part of said disciples Darwins oder Häckels, who may say, No one has ever denied seeing to the eye, or hearing to the ear. Diderot has still hit in the blank for all that: and for this reason. It does not matter one jot, or one tittle, that you should think, or that you should speak of the "fine known gradations." There may be more and more light; but there is no gradation to it itself. It is, only when it is. Let there be the dark only, and there never will be light.1 It is itself-itself alone-and nothing else. And so it is with sight. All the gradations in the universe never move a step to it. There may be gradations in it, but there are no gradations to it. It is sui generis. It alone is itself. The whole is there in the instant that the first germ is there-but only then, and never, in a dot, a mote, a speck, till then. The entire problem of light is implied in its very earliest dawn; and so equally the problem of sight. Strange that Mr. Darwin should find in gradation that power of creation which he would seem to deny everywhere else; for, as we see, for the first of sight, as for the first of light, there can only be, in either case, simply itself.

But as variation is a process, and no less selection a process, each implying a material, a subject of the same; so gradation itself, by the very term of it, does not create that which it is only concerned to grade. Gradation must have a what if it (gradation) is even to be; and gradation as gradation has no power to create this, that, or any what, let it act on such what as it may,

1 "As well specify the time required for something to come out of nothing."-Schelling, xi. 238.

once said what is. The what of the faculty of sight may have been as small a germ as you please; still so soon as that germ was, sight was; and before that germ was, sight simply was not. Almost it would seem-with this of gradation before us-as though all difficulties would become easy, if only (graded into disappearance) they were thought far enough back-as though Mr. Darwin would really enable himself to see by shutting his eyes.

That gradation indeed cannot create, we have only to look around us. You shall make blue, by accumulation of blue, as intense as you may; but you will never make it a red or a yellow. Even of any colour in the rainbow, it is in vain to seek to establish the origin of it by any gradation from this side or from that. Oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen,-carbon, sulphur, phosphorus,potass, soda, lime,-lead, copper, iron: gradation will not do much to identify such differences as these. So with animals. It is an enormous presumption to say: They are just all of them protoplasm; for let them be protoplasm, it is certain that not one single particle of protoplasm, whether of organ or organism, is interchangeable with that of another. Reduce a pound of gold, say, even to the hundredth of a grain, that hundredth of a grain, in every one specific quality (as weight, colour, etc.), will be still gold, exactly as the pound was. Gradation that will be insensible in the most delicate scale, is powerless to obliterate the constitutive properties. Even the gradation of temperature that is all-powerful over states-ice, water, steam-cannot put a tooth into the substance (HO) itself.

But the one word is enough: gradation cannot create. We have only to put the whole animal organisation generally, into the light of this remark to be enabled to see the futility of claiming creation for a series of miscellaneous accidents. "The old argument from design

fails," says Mr. Darwin, with just a delightful little turn in his voice," now that the law of natural selection has been discovered!"

But has there been a discovery? and actually of a law? We have seen an hypothesis-a gourd, as it were, that came up in a night to be a shadow over the land but a discovery? Can what the Pampas suggested, or South America, or the Galapagos-can what the breeders and fanciers suggested, or what Malthus suggested, or what the split up stock of horses suggested can either or all of these suggestions be called a discovery? That the similarities in species (as in the beetles, say) should have struck him, and that he should have then asked, What, if naturally varying in time, and so naturally variously applied, they were all just naturally out of each other?-that is a mere supposition—it is no discovery. Even as a supposition, is it a credible one-unless we remove it, far far out of sight, into the dark? Yes variations, accidents, we know them very well, we see them daily; but they come and they go, they appear and they disappear, they are born and they die out-they really do nothing; and as for forming new creatures, is not that an extraordinarily weighty complication to burden such simple perishable, transitory, passing accidents with? A mother's mark is as perfect a variation of chance as even Mr. Darwin could figure for himself; but when did a mother's mark found a species ? We do not isolate them! Think you that would be enough as an allsatisfactory reply? They certainly do pass!

So far, one can only see the entrance here of the first fallacy, on the part of the public, in reference to Mr. Darwin. It was really believed that one of the greatest of the known and established experts had discovered something. He had discovered nothing. For years he