236 SPECIES NOT 



CHAPTER XII. 



SINCE the MS. of this work was sent to the 

 press, I have read the discussion at Oxford, and 

 beg to offer one or two remarks upon the argu- 

 ments of Professor Huxley and Dr. Hooker, the 

 two champions of Mr. Darwin's views. 



Professor Huxley says that Mr. Darwin's theory 

 is not an hypothesis, hut an explanation of 

 natural phenomena. Now really, I think this is 

 drawing rather too strongly upon our credulity. 

 Surely Mr. Huxley cannot mean that the doctrines 

 of ''natural selection" and "variation of species," 

 are mere demonstrations of nature? If so, the 

 whole question would be out of the range of 

 argument. For my own part, I conceive that 

 Mr. Darwin's theory fails, not only from the 

 want of facts, but by the misinterpretation and 

 misapplication of both real and assumed natural 

 phenomena. Mr. Darwin sees a shrike taking 

 its bath on a hot day, and he claims this as an 

 instance of "divergence in character" from the 

 shrike to the kingfisher. He sees a substitution 

 of whalebone for teeth in one genus of a family, 

 all the rest of which have teeth; and because in 

 the former the teeth are found rudimentary, Mr. 

 Darwin believes that the animal could not have 

 been thus imperfectly specially created, and claims 

 it as an instance of variation by natural selection ! 



