288 DARWINIANISM. 



variations involving now applications in nature would 

 account for them ! In consequence of this idea that all 

 that he saw of unity, and plan, and concert in the 

 universe should so absolutely have left him, and that 

 simply abstract change, utterly fortuitous change, as 

 explanatory principle, should have alone absorbed him ! 

 As the dip of the Sultan's head into the water-butt gave 

 him to live an entire new lifetime in the duration of a 

 second; so the principles of the whole universe were 

 altered in a moment to Mr. Darwin by a single sting 

 of the bee. " Darwin's observations on the effects of 

 crossing pigeons," says Mr. Leslie Stephen, " have led to 

 a revolution in the whole philosophy of Europe ! " 



It is not so certain, however, that the reason of 

 purpose is not as natural to nature, so to speak, as the 

 apparent unreason of material necessity. It is just by 

 a natural reason that the gull, as it rises from the earth, 

 tucks its legs in ; or that " an Exmoor pony, bogged in 

 a quagmire, will," according to Mr. Whyte Melville, 

 " flap its way out on its side, to scramble into safety 

 with scarce a quiver or a snort." Nor less under a 

 natural reason is that yellow feathery ball on its one 

 leg of the sleeping canary. Or again, when a bird or 

 crow sits down and looks about it on a point high in 

 air, say the rod of a weathercock on a belfry from 

 which the cock has fallen, is that ancestry, think you, 

 or is it natural reason ? The heart is not far from the 

 stomach ; but the bagpipe end of the latter is so fairly 

 well down that you may take a good deal of cold water 

 into it without any influence that will tell on the former. 

 And talk as you may of gradation through as many 

 animals as your Text-Book can count, is it not nature's 

 own reason, think you, that has drawn through the 

 pulley there that muscle-sinew which has only obliquely 

 to lift the eye ? If it is reason in you to cut a trench 



