104 OSTRICH-FARMING IN SOUTH AFRICA. 



are sufficient to account for all the wonderful and 

 beautiful thino;s in nature which we see around us, is to 

 us a monstrous idea, and can only be entertained by 

 those who, observing the working of these two laws, 

 become so wrapt in them that they lose sight of the in- 

 numerable other laws wliich Providence has placed to 

 keep everything in the same order in which it Avas 

 created. These men refer all the gorgeous and wonder- 

 ful colourino; in the veo-etable kingdom to the attraction 



o o o 



these form to the various insectivora to settle on them, 

 thus carrying the pollen to the stigma ; whilst they 

 account for the gorgeous colouring of m.oths and but- 

 terflies, and of birds, by the greater attraction wdiich 

 the more gorgeously-coloured males present to the 

 females than do the less-favoured ones. 



By the action of these laws they attempt to prove 

 that all the various forms in the living world have been 

 developed from one, or, at the most, four or five 

 species. But in all their arguments they carefully 

 ignore the scarcely less beautiful and varied colouring 

 of birds' eggs, which cannot in any way be accounted 

 for by either of these laws, as the law of the " survival 

 of the fittest'* would have kept all eggs to neutral tints, 

 or to tints closely resembling that of the surface on 

 which they are laid. That occasional cases of this may 

 be foundj we are aware ; but for every such case dozens 



