XIIL] CRITICISMS ON &quot;THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES/ 275 



&quot;forme substantielle,&quot; or a chimerical personification of the 

 powers of Nature, would be incredible, were it not that 

 other passages of his work leave no room for doubt upon the 

 subject. 



&quot; On imagine une election naturelle que, pour plus de management, on me 

 dit etre inconsciente, sans s apercevoir que le contre-sens littoral est pre cise - 

 ment la : election inconsciente&quot; (P. 52.) 



&quot; J ai deja dit ce qu il faut penser de Selection naturelle. Ou Selection 

 naturelle n est rien, ou c est la nature : mais la nature doue&quot;e Selection, mais 

 la nature personnifiee : derniere erreur du dernier siecle : Le xix e ne fait 

 plus de personnifications.&quot; (P. 53.) 



M. Flourens cannot imagine an unconscious selection it is for 

 him a contradiction in terms. Did M. Flourens ever visit one of 

 the prettiest watering-places of &quot;la belle France,&quot; the Baie 

 d Arcachon ? If so, he will probably have passed through the 

 district of the Landes, and will have had an opportunity of 

 observing the formation of &quot; dunes &quot; on a grand scale. What 

 are these &quot; dunes &quot; ? The winds and waves of the Bay of Biscay 

 have not much consciousness, and yet they have with great care 

 &quot; selected,&quot; from among an infinity of masses of silex of all shapes 

 and sizes, which have been submitted to their action, all the 

 grains of sand below a certain size, and have heaped them by 

 themselves over a great area. This sand has been &quot; unconsciously 

 selected &quot; from amidst the gravel in which it first lay with as 

 much precision as if man had &quot; consciously selected &quot; it by the 

 aid of a sieve. Physical Geology is full of such selections of 

 the picking out of the soft from the hard, of the soluble from the 

 insoluble, of the fusible from the infusible, by natural agencies 

 to which we are certainly not in the habit of ascribing 

 consciousness. 



But that which wind and sea are to a sandy beach, the sum of 

 influences, which we term the &quot; conditions of existence,&quot; is to 

 living organisms. The weak are sifted out from the strong. A 

 frosty night &quot;selects&quot; the hardy plants in a plantation from 

 among the tender ones as effectually as if it were the wind, and 

 they, the sand and pebbles, of our illustration ; or, on the other 

 hand, as if the intelligence of a gardener had been operative iu 



