-even among insects and birds the greater number are plainly coloured, and show no great difference of sex-in numerous marine creatures, whose mode of life renders concealment unnecessary, 'warning colours' are futile, and sexual coloration impossible, the frequently brilliant colours are entirely due to pigment deposited in the skin. On the other hand, in butterflies and birds, where sexual selection and so forth is conceivable, the colours are largely produced by mechanical causes affecting the structure of feathers or scales-the varying coloration of the common earthworm is due to different pigments, but the earthworm being blind as well as hermaphrodite, can have no leaning towards a male of a specially bright hue-the rook as he follows the plough is no respecter of anneloids' persons, and gobbles up all that comes in his way, brown and green, purple and red.-It is not too much to say that nearly all, if not quite all, birds in which the two sexes (as in the peacock) show a marked disparity of coloration, owe their brilliant hues to structural peculiarities of the feathers, and not to pigments. But if this be so, how is it that we get so great a variety of tints among animals which are exclusively coloured by the pigments? The only answer to this question at present seems to be to say that there is no answer. The bile shows differences of colour in various animals, being green in one and yellow in another; the inside of one lizard's body is coloured deep-brown, of another it is not coloured at all; birds' eggs show the most varied hues, which, except in a very few cases, can be of no use whatever, as they are hidden by the sitting hen."

Instead of quoting many marked passages, I will just observe of so familiar a book as the Natural History of Selborne, that if any one will read it in this connection, he may be apt to find himself not by any means firm as a possible Darwinian in conclusion. So many things are double-sided. Thus, if we accentuated the differences that appear in the stock of horses which is said to split up into race-horses, etc., we only forget the fact that they are all horses still. In the same way, it is no doubt true that the foot of the tame duck becomes heavier, as its wing, possibly, lighter; and it may be all very well for Mr. Darwin to think of this in his own direction. Nevertheless, wild or tame, they are not the

less ducks. Even Dr. Carpenter here, in the interest of his own originality, is anti-Darwinian enough to point out that the foraminifera, however widely they diverge from their palæozoic originals, "still remain foraminifera." Aristotle has got hold of a true principle in such cases, when he observes that essential parts are invariable, as the eye itself, but not its colour. When we think of certain shells which are about the most beautiful things in existence, we may be prompted to add form to colour as only an unmotived product on the part of an allunconscious mollusc. Mr. Beddard remarks, as we have seen, that, in certain cases, "warning colours are futile and sexual coloration impossible;" and it would seem that, in reference to these shells, not colour alone, but form also is similarly situated, whether for the one. selection or the other.

One cannot but be reminded here of the general method peculiar to Mr. Darwin by which he would seek to establish his conclusions. "There is an à priori theory," as I say elsewhere, "and then there is a miscellany of remark in regard to facts to support it.” That, probably, is but the necessary result of committing oneself to the "scattering and unsure observance" of a common-place book's disarticulatedness. The attempt always is to bring the unconnected cases of the miscellany into something of coherency, by no more vigorous ratiocination than natural conjecture; at the same time that the very facts themselves are, in consequence of the manner in which they have been taken up, not always to be regarded as more than very loosely founded. We have already seen instances of this stories which, by example of Plato, we have called stories for children; not that it is to be understood that they belong all of them to Mr. Darwin himself. Such stories as those that concern the spots of the leopard belong rather, so

to speak, to the camp (the leopard is to be found in the grandfather). It is from the camp that I think I derive the story of the hair on the arm growing downwards from shoulder to elbow, but just in the contrary direction from elbow to wrist, because our sometime ancestor stood in the rain with his hands folded over the head, although it is to be supposed that he might have run, poor devil, into his cave; or, indeed, it might be asked, How was it with him when he was yet on allfours? Still there come a sufficiency of such stories from Mr. Darwin himself, as Hearne the Hunter, or say this of the conversion of a fish into a bird:ing that we have flying birds and mammals, flying insects, and formerly had flying reptiles, it is conceivable "it is conceivable!" that flying fish might have been modified into perfectly-winged animals."

"See

This (Origin, p. 140) is a perfectly fair specimen of Mr. Darwin's usual ratiocination; and, of course, it may carry conviction home to most people who are contented with a picture for argument; but still, in strict logic it is no more than a gesticulation in the air. The fact is, that of the two judgments which are named by Kant, the one the "subsuming," and the other the "reflecting," judgment, it is Mr. Darwin's habit to use only the latter. He hunts, with that quick family imagination of his, for a generale to a certain number of particulars. He has first these latter, a mixed, disunited, plurality of particulars, which he cannot help seeing with an uneasy desire of unity; and as a universal or general rule or proposition really does not exist under which it (the plurality) or they (the particulars) would, as a matter of course, naturally and logically fall, he finds himself unconsciously driven to look about him for the discovery of one, or, in ultimate resort, at least for its invention. But such rule or universal being scarcely ever a true

universal-i.e. the true logical universal of the natural facts as logical particulars-has never the force of a constitutive, but only of a regulative, and, generally, very loosely regulative, principle. As we have seen again

and again, the only principle proper to Mr. Darwin is accidental variation followed by a conjectural accidental selection. It surely stands to common sense that it cannot be well possible to point to any two principles that would be looser and more equivocal and insecure than these, not on any terms as constitutive, but simply as regulative. Keener senses than those of Mr. Darwin never existed; but, for all that, his imagination is keener still; and almost the products of the former become travestied into the products of the latter. Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), in his More Nevochim, complains of both Christian and Mahommedan writers, that, "in the realisation of their principles, they have not followed the nature of the thing itself; they have only considered how the thing must be, if it is to support their doctrine, and so then afterwards boldly asserted that the thing is so, and that it is so they drag all possible materials from elsewhere to prove they confound for the most part imagination with understanding, and give the former the name of the latter. Everything might as well be otherwise than it is, absolutely no ground being present why each thing is so rather than not so." May we not bring these old sayings at least in illustration of much that we have here before us?

"I suspect (for I have never read it) that Spencer's Psychology has a bearing on psychology as we should look at it." So says Mr. Darwin once (ii. 265) to Lyell, and this is so far an acknowledgment on his part of other principles, modes of looking, than those usual in philosophy generally. That ordinary anecdotical manner of his, indeed, to call it reminds only of these old stories of the Middle Ages,

as of the fish clopias that becomes white under crescent, black under waning moon; or of the cuttle-fish, that, type of the condemned sinner, never rises from the bottom of the sea; or of the hyæna, that changes its "adulterous nature' every year, alternately male and female; or of the weasel, that, as type of unclean men, bears by its mouth. These are but examples of how it is that the unreason of the common man degrades into myths the reason of the uncommon. It is as Anselm complains of the Nominalists: "Their thinking is so involved in corporeal conceptions (in corporalibus rationibus obvoluta) that it cannot disengage itself from them." And it is such issues that Whewell has in view when he says. that "they derive their origin and growth only from the dead body of true science; they resemble the swarm of insects that rise from the putrid carcase of a nobler animal."

Anything may be born of anything! That is really the outcome of Mr. Darwin with his x of organism, abstract organism, organism as organism, no matter particularly what, which he feigns between the two extremes of a past and a future, of neither of which he knows anything. There is a writer, Wolfgang Musculus († 1563), who speaks very much to this point thus: "God has in no wise permitted or commanded that anything should be born of anything (ut de quolibet nascatur quodlibet.). He has appointed the earth to be in a certain way the mother of all her products—but she must in no wise alter genera, or forms, or natural forces, or colours, or odours. Obeying God's command, she receives all creatures, and gives them back, even as she receives them. For a God of order is God, who has not willed that there should arise any confusion of genera, but that the species of each tree, vegetable, plant, with all properties there appertinent, should be kept in preservation." "She must in