IDIOSYNCRASY. 393 



chances that that cell would be so connected with other cells elsewhere 

 as to make any part of an organized brain ? Can we imagine a new 

 cell so imported, connected in rational manners with hundreds of other 

 cells, in any other way than by a miracle ? Which is only a different 

 form of saying, can we imagine it at all ? 



But here, again, is something more than William Jones's head ; 

 here is, let us say, a great poet's, or a great philosopher's, or a great 

 mathematician's head ; and here are the upholders of spontaneous va- 

 riation asking us to believe, not that one cell within it thus spontane- 

 ously varied in the right direction, but that a vast number of cells and 

 fibers all varied simultaneously and symmetrically, so as to produce a 

 harmonious and working whole, capable of giving us Othello, or the 

 Evolution Theory, or the Differential Calculus. Why, the thing is 

 clearly impossible impossible, that is to say, as a result of "acci- 

 dental " physical causes. We might just conceivably imagine one or 

 two fibers made to connect one or two hitherto unconnected nerve- 

 cells, though even here the probability that the nerve-cells so connected 

 were of heterogeneous orders would be far greater than the probability 

 that they were of homogeneous orders ; we could much more readily 

 imagine such connections resulting in a potentiality for believing that 

 a lobster's tail was a blue hope of raspberry watches than in a poten- 

 tiality for believing that water was composed of hydrogen and oxy- 

 gen, or that propositions in A were not convertible. But we certainly 

 can not imagine a whole network of such fibers to spring up by spon- 

 taneous variation in a human brain, and yet to produce an organized 

 result. If spontaneous variation ever works in this way, its product 

 must surely be either an idiot or a raving madman. To believe the 

 opposite is too much like believing in Mr. Crosse's electrical Acari y 

 which were developed de novo, out of inorganic material, in a dirty 

 galvanic battery, and yet possessed all the limbs and organs of degen- 

 erate spiders. It is asking us once more to accept a still greater mir- 

 acle than the first. 



But such miracles, it is urged, do take place elsewhere in nature. 

 For example, an almond-tree, let us say, once produced a peach-bear- 

 ing branch by bud-variation. Hence it has been inferred that the 

 peach is a spontaneous variation on the central almond theme. Yet 

 peaches are in color, fleshiness, sweetness, and perfume, true fruits, 

 adapted to the fruity method of dispersion, by means of attracting 

 birds ; whereas the almond is a nut, with the usual nutty peculiarities 

 of green and brown color, dryness, absence of sweet juice, and so 

 forth. In this case, then, it would seem that bud-variation imme- 

 diately produced a variety adapted to a different environment in ever 

 so many distinct ways. Well, I have introduced this case, just be- 

 cause it illustrates the very impossibility of such a supposition. For 

 it seems pretty clear that if peaches have grown at one act from al- 

 monds, then this must really be a case of reversion ; the almond must 



