passage, Mr. Huxley calls the variation "spontaneous," there can be no hesitation in acknowledging that he is absolutely correct in asserting the single suggestion he has in view to be the central idea, and to constitute the quintessence of Darwinism: the suggestion, namely, that new species may result from such and such selective action on such and such individual variation. A variation occurs spontaneously in an organism; and it is followed up by a selective action on (or through) the conditions in its environment. These are the conditions Mr. Huxley means now; and that to him, as it is to us, is the whole idea of Darwinism-the quintessence of Darwinismthe centre, and the soul, and the very self of Darwinism. For the sake of clearness, I may just point out here a third set of external conditions. The "attraction of gravity," namely, "light," etc., which Mr. Darwin names in connection with the "power of movement" in plants, are quite entitled to the same designation; but, however relevant as referred to, they are not to be regarded as elements in the Darwinian construction.

We may return now to this, that, in their first sense, Mr. Huxley disagreed with Mr. Darwin as to the action of external conditions in respect of variations in individual organisms-disagreed so widely, indeed, that it was not clear to him (Huxley) " how, without continual physical conditions, variation should occur at all." Confusion in regard to the various sets of conditions is not to be thought of when these words were written. There must, at that time, have been points of serious disagreement on the part of Mr. Huxley with the views of Mr. Darwin. It is Mr. Darwin himself who writes to Mr. Huxley in 1860 (ii. 354): "This makes me feel a little disappointed that you are not inclined to think the general view in some slight degree more probable than you did at first. This I consider rather ominous. I entirely agree with you that the difficulties

EFFECT ON THE PUBLIC HOOKER AND LYELL. 341

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on my notions are terrific." Nor, if it was so with Mr Huxley, was it in any respect better-rather, was it not worse? with Sir Joseph Hooker and Sir Charles Lyell, who, as the confidants of Mr. Darwin, had, on various public occasions, been the means of trumpeting the story of our long-tailed or four-footed ancestors to an astonished world, which could but breathlessly rush to see and to know? Mr. Darwin will have it (i. 87), that it was not, as it has been sometimes said, that the success of the Origin proved that the subject was in the air,' or 'that men's minds were prepared for it.' I do not think that this is strictly true," he says, "for I occasionally sounded not a few naturalists, and never happened to come across a single one who seemed to doubt about the permanence of species. Even Lyell and Hooker, though they would listen with interest to me, never seemed to agree." Of Lyell he had already written to Dr. Asa Gray in 1863, "You speak of Lyell as a judge; now what I complain of is that he declines to be a judge. I have sometimes almost wished that Lyell had pronounced against me." To Lyell himself, too, he writes (ii. 300), "It is a great blow to me that you cannot admit the potency of natural selection;" and again, "I grieve to see you hint at the creation of distinct successive types, as well as of distinct aboriginal types." To the same Gray he avows also, "You never say a word or use an epithet which does not express fully my meaning. Now Lyell, Hooker, and others, who perfectly understand my book, yet sometimes use expressions to which I demur." It is to be feared that even this Dr. Asa Gray, who never said a discrepant word, was pretty much, for all that, in the same state of mind as Hooker and Lyell. Mr. Darwin, himself, in the very next paragraph of the very same letter, can only say of him, "I yet hope, and almost believe, that the time will come when you will go farther, in believing a very large amount of modification of species, than you did at first, or do now. Can you tell me whether you believe further, or more firmly, than you did at first?" It is quite touchingly suggestive of the situation, and quite pathetic, to hear Mr. Darwin, so painfully, simply in earnest, follow up his question by, "I should really like to know this!" Mr. Darwin, indeed, must have occasionally suffered dreadfully at this time from distrust, and mistrust, and want of confidence in the soundness and cogency of what he had so much his heart in. He tells Asa Gray of the thought of the eye making him "cold all over." Nay, he says, "the sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!" It is in much the same mood of mind, or with the same problem before him, that he cries out once to Huxley, "If, as I must think, external conditions produce little direct effect, what the devil determines each particular variation ? What makes a tuft of feathers come on a cock's head, or moss on a moss-rose?"

For us, from such expressions as these, we are brought very close to the question as Mr. Darwin sees it. There is no formed difference that he would not like to account for; and he does not always see his way to this in a start from certain rudimentary or initial spontaneous differences, which his theory obliges him to assume. "I believe," he says, "most beings vary at all times enough for selection to act on," - that is, he means, as it were, and as Mr. Huxley directly says, "spontaneously" vary. Hence advantage and disadvantage in the struggle for life, with the necessary survival of the fittest.

We have thus broken ground on the views of Mr. Darwin, and will be already able to judge, in some degree, of the relation which, according to Mr. Darwin himself, these views bear to the argument from design; and that alone is the consideration which interests us here. We must continue the subject with, I hope, a closer approach in our next.

GIFFORD LECTURE THE EIGHTEENTH.

The theory-Individual variation-Darwin early looked for natural explanation of design-Creation, its senses-Antisthenes, Colebrooke, Cudworth - Creative ideas-Anaxagoras-Aristotle Mr. Clair Grece and Darwin-For design Mr. Darwin offers a mechanical pullulation of individual difference through chance, but with consequent results that as advantageous or disadvantageous seem concerted-The Fathers-Nature the phenomenon of the noumenon, a boundless externality of contingency that still is a life-Nature, the object will only be when it reaches the subject-That object be, or subject be, both must be-Even the crassest material particle is already both elementarily-As it were, even inorganic matter possesses instincts-Aristotle, design and necessity-Internalization-Time space, motion, matterThe world - Contingency - A perspective of pictures - The Vestiges and evolution - Darwin deprecates genealogies, but returns to them-The mud-fish-Initial proteine--There are so many mouths to eat it up now--- Darwin recants his pentateuchal concession to creation-Depends on "fanciers and breeders"The infinitudes of transition just taken by Mr. Darwin in a step -Hypothesis-Illustration at random-Difference would go on to difference, not return to the identity--Mr. Lewes and Dr. Erasmus-The grandfather's filament-Seals-The bear and the whale-Dr. Erasmus on the imagination, on weeping, on fear, on the tadpole's tail, on the rationale of strabismus.

We have now reached something of an insight into the theorem or theory of Mr. Darwin. I know not that it can be better put than as we have seen it put, in his own clear way, by Mr. Huxley. "The suggestion," he says, "that new species may result from the selective action of external conditions upon the variations from their specific type which individuals present, and which we call 'spontaneous,' because we are ignorant of their causation that suggestion is the central idea of the Origin of Species, and contains the quintessence of Darwinism." Perhaps we might object to the phrase "variations from their specific type" as insufficiently exact. Variation from specific type, we might say, has already achieved the whole problem-at a word! If there is spontaneous variation from the specific typeif that is a fact, then "the selective action of external conditions" seems supererogatory, seems to have nothing left for it to do: what was wanted is already accomplished. A variation from the specific type, a new creature, is already there; and we are just simply ignorant of its causation. Mr. Darwin himself does not conceive the first variation to be more than an individual variation (children only individually vary from their parents) he does not conceive it to be by any means a specific variation-a variation at once into a new creature. Specific variation, a new creature, is to Mr. Darwin only the result - perhaps after millions of generations of the eventual accumulation, by inheritance, of an indefinite almost of an infinite-number of individual differences. So much importance, indeed, does Mr. Darwin attach to the first individual difference, to the very first initial modification as the absolutely first step in the process, and the consequent divergence of character from the gradual accumulation of steps, modifications, that he would almost consent to withdraw the phrase natural selection. Compared to the question of Creation or Modification," he says (ii. 371), "Natural Selection seems to me utterly unimportant." And that brings us to the question that is between Mr. Darwin and ourselves-the question of design, namely. Early in life Mr. Darwin's father "proposed that he should become a clergyman," and he himself in the first instance

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