THE DARWINIAN THEORY 



trying to observe it with a one-twelfth inch 

 oil immersion lens of his microscope, is 

 sufficiently illustrated by the words on this 

 subject of one of the greatest biologists 

 of the age, Professor Carl Wilhelm von 

 Nageli of Munich, who says, " That the 

 distance which separates man from the 

 lowest bacterium is far less than the dis- 

 tance between the lowest bacterium and 

 inorganic matter! " Then as to the " su- 

 preme discovery of Natural Selection " 

 accounting for the origin of species, Pro- 

 fessor Nageli remarks, that Natural Selec- 

 tion might have been of use to prune some 

 leaves from the biological tree, but that it 

 was totally unable to give origin to the 

 smallest twig thereof. 



The Darwinian theory, as is well 

 known, first postulates an inherent tend- / 

 ency to spontaneous variation in all di- 

 rections, in living organisms, plant or an- 

 imal, and secondly, that those variations 

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