18%.] ^'^ [Bailey. 



as species or as fixed types. Species were created by Joliu Ray, not by 

 the Lord ; they were named by Linnoeus, not by Adam. 



I must now hasten to anticipate an objection to my phi-ase which may 

 arise in your minds. I have said that when characters are unlike existing 

 characters they stand a chance of persisting ; but I do not desire to say 

 that they are useful in proportion as ihey are unlike their kin. I want to 

 express my conviction that mere sports are rarely useful. These are no 

 doubt the result of very unusual or complex stimuli, or of unwonted 

 refrangibility of the energy of growth, and not having been induced by 

 conditions which act uniformly over a course of time, they are likely to 

 be transient. I fully accept Cope's remark that there is "no ground for 

 believing that sports have any considerable influence on the course of 



evolution The method of evolution has apparently been one of 



successioual increment and decrement of parts along definite lines." 

 Amongst domestic animals and plants the selection and breeding of sports, 

 or very unusual and marked variations, has been a leading cause of their 

 strange and diverse evolution. In fact, it is in this jjarticular thing that 

 the work of the breeder and the gardener are most unlike the work of 

 nature. But in feral conditions, the sport may be likened to an attribute 

 out of place ; and I imagine that its chief effect upon the phylogeny of a 

 race — if any efiect it have — is in giving rise in its turn to a brood of less 

 erratic unlikenesses. This question of sports has its psychological signifi- 

 cance, for if the way becomes dark the wanderer invokes the aid of this 

 ignusfafuus to cut short his difficulties. Sir William Thompson supposes 

 that life may first have come to earth by way of some meteor, and Brinton 

 proposes that man is a sport from some of the lower creation. It is certainly 

 a strange type of mind which ascribes a self-centred and self-sufficient 

 power to the tree of life, and then, at the very critical points, adopts a 

 wliolly extraneous force and one which is plainly but a survival of the 

 old cataclysmic type of mind ; and it is the stranger, too, because such 

 type of explanation is not suggested by observation or experiment, but 

 simply by what is for the time an insuperable barrier of ignorance of 

 natural processes. If evolution is true at all, there is reason to suppose 

 that it extends from beginning to finish of creation, and the stopping of 

 the process at obscure intervals is only a temporary satisfaction to a mind 

 that is not yet fully committed to the eternal truth of ascent. The tree of 

 life has no doubt grown steadily and gradually, and the same forces, 

 variously modified by the changing pliysical conditions of the earth, have 

 run on with slow but mighty energy until the present time. Any radical 

 change in tlie plan would have defeated it, and any mere accidental cir- 

 cumstance is too trivial to be considered as a modifying infiuence of the 

 great onward movement of creation, particularly when it assumes to 

 account for the appearing of the very capstone of the whole mighty 

 structure. 



Bear with me if I recite a few specific examples of the survival of the 

 unlike, or of the importance, to organic types, of gradually widening dif- 



