168 Darwin and his Teachings. [| April, 
which the various living tribes have been placed, were such as 
favoured, or conduced to the calling forth, popularly speaking, of 
new powers and instincts. Thus limiting our inquiry, we find in 
his great book a mass of evidence almost sufficient to establish the 
hypothesis of Lamarck, and quite enough to justify naturalists in 
assuming that new species have so arisen, until some still more 
amplified rule is presented to them. Neither can we deny their 
right to adopt Darwin’s theory as their guide in classification, as 
the nearest approach that has yet been made to a scientific method 
of explaining the leading biological phenomena of nature. 
One great objection that has been raised against his mode of 
accounting for the origin of species is, that he has not himself 
been successful in breedmg a new variety, which, when crossed 
with others from the same parent stock, produced a sterile off- 
spring; in short, that he himself has been unable to make a new 
species. This fact has, we think, been unfairly weighed and treated 
both by the eminent investigator and his opponents. The former 
seeks to prove that infertility is not the infallible rule with crossed 
species in nature; and he takes great pains to make light, as it 
were, of the phenomenon as an objection to his theory. If he had 
succeeded in this better than he has done, he would simply have 
shown his unprejudiced readers that the exceptions prove the rule ; 
but it would, as it appears to us, have lent additional strength to his 
cause if he had fully admitted this well-established law of nature. 
For it is quite natural and completely in agreement with the view 
that the Almighty slowly changes the instincts and structures of 
living beings in accordance with the changing surface of the globe, 
that those instincts and structures should, by becoming more and 
more divergent, cease to render the possessors attractive to and con- 
formable with each other. This plam mode of regarding the question 
causes the presence of a new species to assume quite a fresh signi- 
ficance; and this aspect of the case appears to us well worthy 
of consideration. The controlling influences of external nature, 
although analogous to hybridism,* may not be sufficiently rapid in 
their operation to serve as a check upon the production of new 
beings, and therefore it would appear that Providence has applied 
hybridity as a special check,t a kind of ratchet, as it were, upon 
the revolving wheel of life; and thus appears to be prevented that 
reversion to the original stock which might otherwise take place 
through uncontrolled inter-crossing, and also a too rapid production 
of individuals on the surface of the globe. The appearance of 
a new species is, according to this view, to be considered as the 
result of an impeditive or conservative influence, rather than one 
of the progressive phenomena in nature. 
* See ‘ Origin of Species,’ p. 299, last paragraph. 
+ In this Darwin does not believe. Sve ibid., p. 299, par. 2. 
