234 DARWINIANA. 



their surroundings then, as those which flourish and 

 bloom around us are to their conditions now. Order 

 and exquisite adaptation did not wait for man's coming, 

 nor were they ever stereotyped. Organic Nature — by 

 which I mean the system and totality of living things, 

 and their adaptation to each other and to the world — 

 with all its apparent and indeed real stability, should 

 be likened, not to the ocean, which varies only by tidal 

 oscillations from a fixed level to which it is always 

 returning, but rather to a river, so vast that we can 

 neither discern its shores nor reach its sources, whose 

 onward flow is not less actual because too slow to be 

 observed by the ephemerae, which hover over its surface, 

 or are borne upon its bosom. 



Such ideas as these, though still repugnant to some, 

 and not long since to many, have so possessed the 

 minds of the naturalists of the present day that hardly 

 a discourse can be pronounced or an investigation pros- 

 ecuted without reference to them. I suppose that the 

 views here taken are little, if at all, in advance of the 

 average scientific mind of the day. I cannot regard 

 them as less noble than those which they are suc- 

 ceeding. An able philosophical writer, Miss Frances 

 Power Cobbe, has recently and truthfully said : ' 



"It is a singular fact that, when we can find out how any- 

 thing is done, our first conclusion seems to he that God did not 

 do it. No matter how wonderful, how beautiful, how intimate- 

 ly complex and delicate has heen the machinery which has 

 worked, perhaps for centuries, perhaps for millions of ages, to 

 bring about some beneficent result, if we can but catch a glimpse 

 of the wheels its divine character disappears." 



1 " Darwinism in Morals," in Theological Revieic, April, 1871. 



