NATURAL SELECTION CRITICISED. 299 



as of the fish clopias that becomes white under crescent, 

 black under waning moon ; or of the cuttle-fish, that, 

 type of the condemned sinner, never rises from the 

 bottom of the sea ; or of the hyaena, that changes its 

 " adulterous nature " every year, alternately male and 

 female ; or of the weasel, that, as type of unclean men, 

 bears by its mouth. These are but examples of how it 

 is that the unreason of the common man degrades into 

 myths the reason of the uncommon. It is as Anselm com- 

 plains of the Nominalists : " Their thinking is so involved 

 in corporeal conceptions (in corporalibus rationibus obvo- 

 luta) that it cannot disengage itself from them." And 

 it is such issues that Whewell has in view when he says 

 that " they derive their origin and growth only from the 

 dead body of true science ; they resemble the swarm of 

 insects that rise from the putrid carcase of a nobler 

 animaL" 



Anything may be born of anything ! That is really 

 the outcome of Mr. Darwin with his x of organism, 

 abstract organism, organism as organism, no matter par- 

 ticularly what, which he feigns between the two extremes 

 of a past and a future, of neither of which he knows any- 

 thing. There is a writer, Wolfgang Musculus (f 1563), 

 who speaks very much to this point thus : " God has in 

 no wise permitted or commanded that anything should be 

 born of anything (ut de quolibet nascatur quodlibet.). He 

 has appointed the earth to be in a certain way the mother 

 of all her products but she must in no wise alter genera, 

 or forms, or natural forces, or colours, or odours. Obey- 

 ing God's command, she receives all creatures, and rivrs 

 them back, even as she receives them. For a God of 

 order is God, who has not willed that there should arise 

 any confusion of genera, but that the species of each 

 tree, vegetable, plant, with all properties there a]>]>n- 

 tinent, should be kept in preservation." " She must in 



