ATTITUDE OF WORKING NATURALISTS. 247 



much occasion to employ his " capacity for generaliza- 

 tion " upon " the accumulated facts " in their bearing 

 upon the problem of the origin of species ; since the 

 " special creationist," who maintains that they were 

 supernaturally originated just as they are, by the very 

 terms of his doctrine places them out of the reach of 

 scientific explanation. Again, when one reflects upon 

 the new impetus which the derivative hypothesis has 

 given to systematic natural history, and reads the dec- 

 laration of a master in this department (the President 

 of the Linnean Society) that Mr. Darwin " has in this 

 nineteenth century brought about as great a revolution 

 in the philosophic study of organic JSTature as that 

 which was effected in the previous century by the im- 

 mortal Swede," it sounds oddly to hear from Dr. 

 Dawson that " it obliterates the fine perception of dif- 

 ferences from the mind of the naturalist, . . . destroys 

 the possibility of a philosophical classification, reduc- 

 ing all things to a mere series, and leads to a rapid de- 

 cay in systematic zoology and botany, which is already 

 very manifest among the disciples of Spencer and 

 Darwin in England." So, also, " it removes from the 

 study of Xature the ideas of final cause and purpose " 

 — a sentence which reads curiously in the light of Dar- 

 win's special investigations, such as those upon the 

 climbing of plants, the agency of insects in the fertil- 

 ization of blossoms, and the like, which have brought 

 back teleology to natural science, wedded to morphol- 

 ogy and already fruitful of discoveries. 



The difficulty with Dr. Dawson here is (and it need 

 not be underrated) that apparently he cannot as yet 

 believe an adaptation, act, or result, to be purposed the 



