ON THE LATEST FORM OF THE DEVELOPMENT THEORY. 111 
“there is a power always intently watching each slight accidental alteration," (p. 169,) 
and finding a use or fitness where none was intended ; just as a savage, wandering on a 
sea-beach, may, after long search, find a stone which has a rude semblance of a chisel 
or an axe, and use it as such. Hence Mr. Darwin speaks consistently (p. 79) of « giving 
a better chance of profitable Variations occurring; and unless profitable Variations do 
occur, Natural Selection can do nothing." But they will occur, for * Variation will 
cause the slight alterations, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and Natural 
Selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement," (p. 169,) separating it 
from countless others which are not improvements, but, as useless or injurious, are to 
be eliminated. “ Mere chance, as we may call it, might cause one variety to differ in 
some character from its parents." (p.104.) True, it is afterwards explained that chance, 
as here used, does not negative a cause. No one supposed that it did; but it does 
negative any purpose or intelligence in that cause; and Mr. Darwin intimates nothing 
to the contrary. | 
_ There can be no mistake as to the character of such a scheme of cosmogony as this. 
. Creation denied, or pushed back to an infinite distance, and a blind or fatalistic prin- 
ciple watching over a chaos of unmeaning and purposeless things, and slowly eliciting 
from them, during an eternity, all the order and fitness which now characterize the 
organized world. 
* It cannot be objected that there has not been time sufficient for any amount of 
organic change; for the lapse of time has been so great as to be utterly inappreciable 
by the human intellect." (p. 402.) Having cited the speculations of the “uniformi- 
tarian" geologists upon the long roll of ages, “the millions on millions of years " 
needed for the explanation of geological phenomena, according to their mode of reading 
them, it seems a trifling matter for him to ask us to admit, that ages of equal or even 
greater length may have elapsed, of which we have no record in the rocks ; — that, be- 
sides the eternity of which we have some sort of geologic evidence, we should acknowl- 
edge the probable lapse of another eternity that has left no legible traces behind it, 
‘but which happens to be necessary for the purposes of his theory. * Consequently,” 
he says, “if my theory be true, it is indisputable that, before the lowest Silurian 
stratum was deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer than, 
the whole interval from the Silurian age to the present day; and that during these 
vast, yet quite unknown, periods of time, the world swarmed with living. creatures.” 
(p. 268.) “At a period immeasurably antecedent to the Silurian epoch, continents may 
have existed where oceans are now spread out; and clear and open oceans may have 
existed where our continents now stand.” (p. 270.) 
