NATURAL SELECTION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY 261 



Fruits and vegetables must have good nurture to reach perfec- 

 tion, but the gardener knows his labor will be vain unless he 

 starts with seed which is adapted by nature for improvement by 

 judicious nurture ; and while it is hard for us to consider the 

 question whether the arts and accomplishments of normal men are 

 due to anything else than training and education, we feel no such 

 difficulty when the faculties of abnormal or exceptional individuals 

 are in question ; for the restriction of the powers of idiots is 

 clearly correlated with deficient structure, and training and educa- 

 tion are so obviously incompetent to account for the achievements 

 of men of genius that we are apt to believe that their natural or 

 innate powers are different in kind from anything in our own more 

 commonplace selves. 



" The child who is impelled to draw as soon as it can hold a 

 pencil ; the Mozart who breaks out into music as early ; the boy 

 Bidder who worked out the most complicated sums without learn- 

 ing arithmetic; the boy Pascal who solved Euclid of his own con- 

 sciousness, all these," says Huxley, "may be said to have been 

 impelled by instinct as much as the beaver or the bee. And the 

 man of genius is distinct from the man of mere cleverness, by 

 reason of the working in him of strong innate tendencies which 

 cultivation may improve, but which it can no more create than 

 horticulture can make thistles bear figs. Art and industry may 

 get much music, of a sort, out of a penny whistle ; but when all is 

 done, it has no chance against an organ." 



It is most important to bear in mind that while some animals 

 acquire only slowly, and after long training and practice, faculties 

 of which others are born fully possessed, there does not seem to 

 be any corresponding difference in the excellence or in the use- 

 fulness of these faculties, or in those coordinations among them 

 which fit their possessor for useful and beneficial response to the 

 order of nature in the outer world. 



Many birds and some mammals have perfect use of their 

 senses, and have all their muscular movements perfectly coor- 

 dinated at birth ; while others kittens, for example are born 

 blind, all their movements are as vague and aimless as those of the 

 human infant, and even when they are half grown, each deter- 

 minate movement in their frolics is accompanied by many pur- 



