He — ON THE LATEST FORM OF THE DEVELOPMENT THEORY. 
the organization of each plant and animal is nicely adjusted to the place which it 
occupies, and the work which it has to perform. To rebut this conclusion, Mr. Darwin 
brings forward his improvement of the transmutation theory, in which, as already re- 
marked, the office of Natural Selection is to explain and account for all natural adap- 
tations and adjustments, even the nicest and most complex, without any necessity of 
supposing that they were intentional or designed, and consequently without any need 
of referring them to the action of an all-wise Architect. | 
A careless thinker might yet argue, that Natural Selection itself is only an agent of 
the Deity, or a law established by Him for the very purpose of effecting the adaptations 
which are ascribed to it, and which would therefore still be properly regarded as the 
work of Him by whose will and instrument they were fashioned. But such an argu- 
ment would betray only confusion of thought. For Natural Selection is neither a 
created thing, nor a cause, nor a law dependent on the volition of a lawgiver; but it is 
an abstraction and a generalization. It is not N atural Selection that kills out one or 
more Species and preserves others; but climate, food, space, enemies, — or the want of 
them, — these do the work of killing or preserving. God no more created or enacted 
the law of Natural Selection, than he created or enacted the Binomial Theorem. 
The Binomial Theorem is the necessary result of the necessary relations of numbers, 
and even Omnipotence could not abrogate it. Just so, Natural Selection is the in- 
evitable result of the relations of animals to their conditions of existence; or rather, 
it is a general expression for these relations themselves; and thus Omnipotence could 
not abrogate it. Change the climate, food, space, enemies, &c., and Natural Selection 
would still act, but would kill where it now preserves, and preserve where it now 
kills. Thus, the results of the Theory are necessary or fatalistic ; they ca God out 
of creation everywhere.. 
... Moreover, in regard to the peculiarities, or Individual Variations, on which the Theory 
is based, and on which this principle of selection is to operate, there is an equal ex- 
clusion of intelligence and will, and even of law and order. As already explained, 
these peculiarities are the exceptions and monstrosities, — the phenomena which least 
of all admit of being reduced to law, or referred to the action of any uniform cause. 
These aimless and exceptional lusus nature, as they appear to most observers, form the 
chaos or rude matter of the Development Theory, on which the principle of Natural 
Selection, like the deus ex machina, is to operate, and evolve order out of confusion and 
complex adaptations out of accident. In fact, this principle would have nothing to 
do, — it would not be selection, —if the Individual Variations were not multiplied at 
random, and were not purposeless in character. The essence of the hypothesis is, that 
