NOTE A TO PAGE 257. 



The passages in Dr. Whewell's writings, to which allusion is 

 here made, are somewhat too long to be quoted in the text. But 

 as I think they deserved to be given, I will here reprint a letter 

 which I wrote to Nature in March, 1888. 



In his essay on the Reception of the Origin of Species, Prof. Huxley 

 writes : 



" It is interesting to observe that the possibility of a fifth alterna- 

 tive, in addition to the four he has stated, has not dawned upon Dr. 

 Whewell's mind " (Life and Lectures of Charles Darwin, vol. ii, p. 

 195)- 



And again, in the article Science, supplied to The Reign of Queen 

 Victoria, he says : 



" Whewell had not the slightest suspicion of Darwin's main theorem, 

 even as a logical possibility " (p 365). 



Now, although it is true that no indication of such a logical 

 possibility is to be met with in the History of the Inductive Sciences, 

 there are several passages in the Bridgewater Treatise which show a 

 glimmering idea of such a possibility. Of these the following are, 

 perhaps, worth quoting. Speaking of the adaptation of the period of 

 flowering to the length of a year, he says : 



<; Now such an adjustment must surely be accepted as a proof of 

 design, exercised in the formation of the world. Why should the 

 solar year be so long and no longer? or, this being such a length, 

 why should the vegetable cycle be exactly of the same length ? Can 

 this be chance ? . . . . And, if not by chance, how otherwise could 

 such a coincidence occur than by an intentional adjustment of these 

 two things to one another ; by a selection of such an organization in 

 plants as would fit them to the earth on which they were to grow ; 

 by an adaptation of construction to conditions ; of the scale of con- 

 struction to the scale of conditions? It cannot be accepted as an 

 explanation of this fact in the economy of plants, that it is necessary 

 to their existence; that no plants could possibly have subsisted, 



