Miscellaneous. 227 



The assertion of Darwin, which has crept into the title of his work, 

 is, that favoured races are preserved, while all his facts go only to 

 substantiate the assertion that favoured individuals have a better 

 chance in the struggle for life than others. But who has ever over- 

 looked the fact that myriads of individuals of every species constantly 

 die before coming to maturity ? What ought to be shown, if the 

 transmutation theory is to stand, is that these favoured individuals 

 diverge from their specific type ; and neither Darwin nor anybody 

 else has furnished a single fact to show that they go on diverging. 

 The criterion of a true theory consists in the facility with which it 

 accounts for facts accumulated in the course of long-continued investi- 

 gations, and for which the existing theories afforded no explanation. 

 It can certainly not be said that Darwin's theory will stand by that 

 test. It would be easy to invent other theories that might account 

 for the diversity of species quite as well, if not better than Darwin's 

 preservation of favoured races. The difficulty would only be to prove 

 that they agree with the facts of Nature. It might be assumed, for 

 instance, that any one primary being contained the possibilities of 

 all those that have followed, in the same manner as the egg of any 

 animal possesses all the elements of the full-grown individual ; but 

 this would only remove the difficulty one step further back. It 

 would tell us nothing about the nature of the operation by which the 

 change is introduced. Since the knowledge we now have, that similar 

 metamorphoses go on in the eggs of all living beings, has not yet 

 put us on the track of the forces by which the changes they undergo 

 are brought about, it is not likely that by mere guesses we shall 

 arrive at any satisfactory explanation of the very origin of these beings 

 themselves. 



Whatever views are correct concerning the origin of species, one 

 thing is certain, that as long as they exist they continue to produce, 

 generation after generation, individuals which differ from one another 

 only in such peculiarities as relate to their individuality. The great 

 defect in Darwin's treatment of the subject of species lies in the total 

 absence of any statement respecting the features that constitute 

 individuality. Surely, if individuals may vary within the limits 

 assumed by Darwin, he was bound first to show that individuality 

 does not consist of a sum of hereditary characteristics combined with 

 variable elements not necessarily transmitted in their integrity, but 

 only of variable elements. That the latter is not the case, stands 

 recorded in every accurate monograph of all the types of the animal 

 kingdom upon which minute embryological investigations have been 

 made. It is known that every individual egg undergoes a series of 

 definite changes before it reaches its mature condition ; that every 

 germ formed in the egg passes through a series of metamorphoses 

 before it assumes the structural features of the adult ; that in this 

 development the differences of sex may very early become distinct ; 

 and that all this is accomplished in a comparatively very short time, 

 extremely short, indeed, in comparison to the immeasurable periods 

 required by Darwin's theory to produce any change among species ; 

 and yet all this takes place without any deviation from the original 



