THEOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF SPECIES 57 



the intense opposition at first encountered by the 

 principles of the Origin. The naturalist whose genius 

 sympathized most fully with the Linnaean conception 

 would feel that he was admitted, like a seer of old, 

 into the thoughts of the Maker of the Universe. His 

 convictions as to species were to him more than the 

 conclusions of the naturalist; they were a revelation, 

 stirring him to ' break forth and prophesy '. Do we 

 not sometimes recognize a lingering trace of this phase 

 of thought in the serious shake of the head and tone 

 of profound inner conviction with which we are some- 

 limes told that the speaker is decidedly of the opinion 

 that so-and-so is a perfectly good species ? 



We recognize the same sharp antagonism between 

 two irreconcilable sets of ideas when the late W. C. 

 Hevvitson expressed such horror at Roland Trimen's 

 remarkable discovery of the polymorphic mimetic females 

 of the Papilio dardanus (merope) group. The wonderfully 

 acute detection of minute out significant resemblance 

 hidden under the widest possible superficial difference, 

 which enabled the great South African naturalist to un- 

 ravel the tangled relationships, was to Hewitson but one 

 of ' the childish guesses of the . . . Darwinian School '. 

 To meet the carefully-thought-out argument, the only 

 objections that could be urged were, that the conclusion 

 stretched too severely the imagination of the writer, and 

 that it shocked his notion of propriety ! * 



1 See an account of the controversy in Trans. Ent. Soc. Lond., 1874, 

 p. 137. The passages I have alluded to are as follows : ( P. merope, of 

 Madagascar, has a female the exact image of itself; and it would require 

 a stretch of the imagination, of which I am incapable, to believe that the 

 P. merope of the mainland, having no specific difference, indulges in 

 a whole harem of females, differing as widely from it as any other species 

 in the genus. ... In the two species of Papilio which have lately been 

 united, Torquatus and Caudius, and Argentus and Torquatinus, though 

 much unlike each other, there is quite sufficient resemblance not to shock 

 one's notions of propriety.' A little later Mr. Hewitson himself received 

 evidence of the truth of the conclusion he so disliked ; for he told how his 

 collector Rogers had sent ' Papilio merope and P. hippocoon, taken by him 

 in copulation, another illustration of the saying that " truth is stranger 

 than fiction ". I find it very difficult (even with this evidence) to believe 



