NATURAL SELECTION CRITICISED. 285 



only kept a commonplace book a commonplace book 

 for whatever notice, miscellaneously read or heard, might 

 seem to favour his own fondly formed presuppositions, 

 as of bears growing into whales by catching insects in 

 the water ! Such notices, -as bearing only on his own 

 goal, were illustrations, rather than facts. The relative 

 facts facts that were really of power and of place as 

 facts, namely were all known before they were 

 " general facts of the affinities, embryology, rudimentary 

 organs, geological history, and geographical distribution " 

 and they were no discovery of his. What contribu- 

 tion could be called his was a theory, an hypothesis, in 

 mere suggestion of the correlation of the facts. Natural 

 selection was a simple supposition of how said " affinities " 

 might come about. And what were facts to him, were 

 they really so valuable ? Hearne the Hunter ? It is 

 impossible to exaggerate the weight which Mr. Darwin, 

 as to Lyell, lays on such a fact as that. If Lyell would 

 but look at it, he would see that the conversion of a 

 bear into a whale " would be easy," " would offer no 

 difficulty." 



As for the putting of confidence in such facts, we have 

 the testimony of the experience of Mr. Darwin himself. 

 " It is a melancholy and I hope not quite true view of 

 yours," he says to Hooker (ii. 70), " that facts will prove 

 anything, and are therefore superfluous ; " and again 

 (ii. 80 and 95), "nothing is so vexatious to me as so 

 constantly finding myself drawing different conclusions, 

 from better judges than myself, from the same facts." 

 This experience of Mr. Darwin's own is hardly an 

 argument for placing confidence in his, or any other 

 man's, mere commonplace book of facts. 



But if discovery is a misnomer, surely, so, too, is a 

 law. Where in that common current, accidental varia- 

 tion, or in that absolutely hypothetical and imaginary 



