CRUX OF THE EARLY EVOLUTIONISTS. 4* 



had any share in the development of animal and vege- 

 table organs; to see no evidence of design in those 

 wonderful provisions which have been the marvel and 

 delight of observers in all ages. The one who has 

 drawn our attention more than perhaps any other living 

 writer to those very marvels of coadaptation, is the 

 foremost to maintain that they are the result not of 

 desire and design, either within the creature or without 

 it, but of blind chance, working no whither, and due but 

 to the accumulation of innumerable lucky accidents. 



" There are men," writes Professor Tyndall in the 

 ' Nineteenth Century,' for last November, " and by no 

 means the minority, who, however wealthy in regard to 

 facts, can never rise into the region of principles ; and 

 they are sometimes intolerant of those that can. They 

 are formed to plod meritoriously on in the lower levels 

 of thought; unpossessed of the pinions necessary to 

 reach the heights, they cannot realize the mental act 

 the act of inspiration it might well be called by which 

 a man of genius, after long pondering and proving, 

 reaches a theoretic conception which unravels and illu- 

 minates the tangle of centuries of observation and ex- 

 periment. There are minds, it may be said in passing, 

 who, at the present moment, stand in this relation to 

 Mr. Darwin," 



The more rhapsodical parts of the above must go for 

 what they are worth, but I should be sorry to think 

 that what remains conveyed a censure which might 

 fall justly on myself. As I read the earlier part of the 

 passage I confess that I imagined the conclusion was 

 going to be very different from what it proved to be. 



