THE DARWINIAN HYPOTHESIS 13 
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‘any reason to believe that there are any limits to 
‘the amount of modification producible, or to ask 
thow long an animal is ‘likely to endeavour to 
'gratify an impossible desire. The bird, in our 
‘example, would surely have renounced fish dinners 
‘long before it had produced the least effect on leg 
sor neck. 
_ Since Lamarck’s time, almost all competent 
naturalists have left speculations on the origin of 
“Species to such dreamers as the author of the 
_“Vestiges,” by whose well-intentioned efforts the 
-Lamarckian theory received its final condemnation 
in the minds of all sound thinkers. Notwith- 
standing this silence, however, the transmutation 
theory, as it has been called, has been a “skeleton 
in the closet” to many an honest zoologist and 
botanist who had a soul above the mere naming of 
dried plants and skins. Surely, has such an one 
thought, nature is a mighty and consistent whole, 
and the providential order established in the 
world of life must, if we could only see it rightly, 
be consistent with that dominant over the multi- 
form shapes of brute matter. But what is the 
history of astronomy, of all the branches of physics, 
of chemistry, of medicine, but a narration of the 
Steps by which the human mind has been com- 
pelled, often sorely against its will, to recognise 
the operation of secondary causes in events where 
ignorance beheld an immediate intervention of a 
higher power? And when we know that living 
